Big news for me: I’m taking a break from freelancing and have accepted a full-time job at Autodesk on the Shotgun team! This job is basically a corporate-sponsored version of the best parts of what I did as a freelancer, working with my favorite project management tool. I’ll essentially be a technical account manager for the Shotgun team, working from home in NYC and traveling all over the US and the world to help studios in the game, VFX, and film spaces set up and learn how to manage their production pipelines.

What is Shotgun, you may ask? Shotgun is the wondrously artist-friendly project management tool I used to manage the entirety of Just Cause 3’s outsourcing. During the course of working with it, I made a few friends on the Shotgun dev team, and was deeply impressed with the product and the people behind it. Now I’m a part of the team that helps people set it up and learn to use it.

So yeah, WOO! I’ll still be working from home in NYC, but I’ll be traveling quite a bit now and may be in your town soon.

And in case anyone was wondering, I had some comments on why I’m going back to full-time employment. Stepping back from freelancing was a difficult decision. I may try it out again someday, but for now this is the best thing for me and my life. The stress is enormous, and being in constant business development mode in parallel with client work is exhausting.

Because of my specialization in remote production and outsourcing, I’m only needed for a limited amount of the dev cycle, which means most of my gigs only last between two and six months. Repeat clients only happen every few years because I’m typically only brought on at the tail end of a long dev cycle. The end result is that almost every new gig for me is joining a team just as it’s ramping up aggressively, getting hardcore, and sometimes crunching. It’s tiring.

The 50th project of my career is currently wrapping up now, and I thought this would be a great time to switch gears and try something different. Working with project management tools and helping build and improve production pipelines is enormously fun for me, but I haven’t gotten to do that in-depth for quite some time. The scope of the work I’m doing for Autodesk is basically exactly the parts of my freelancing that I liked the most, and getting to focus in on that is going to be fun.

Also, more than anything, doing what I do gets lonely. Since repeat clients are infrequent, the only people I see again are the artists and vendors I work with on various jobs, but I don’t always get to choose which vendors I’m working with — that varies from gig to gig. Having typical work camaraderie is rare for me these days, and that’s grown to bother me more over time. With Autodesk, I’m joining a team with people I already know and have worked with in a different capacity, and really dig in and learn alongside them, do cool things, and travel all over the place. I’m looking forward to that. 🙂

Hi, everybody! My GDC 2017 talk, How to Cut the Tether and Work from Anywhere, is now online for viewing. Here’s the synopsis:

It’s 2017, and it’s increasingly feasible for game teams to be geographically distributed. With the cloud storage, fiber internet, 4G LTE, smartphones, cellular modems and ubiquitous wifi, working remotely is increasingly an option for anyone to achieve at any level of seniority… technically. But what skills and disciplines are necessary to transition from a full-time office worker into someone that works from home, a coffee shop, or the road? It’s a lot more than simply VPNing in, syncing to latest from your team’s source control, and checking email twice a day. Establishing a persistent, reliable remote presence that attracts and retains clients demands a very particular skillset. If you’re wondering how to transition into working from home for your full-time job, wanting to hone your skills as a project manager utilizing remote teams, or even if you’re thinking of striking out on your own and going indie, come listen!

I’m very proud of this, and I hope you enjoy it. 🙂