Engine support goes to GDC
This year I represented my team at GDC in San Francisco, sitting in on customer meetings alongside account and partner teams — hundreds of meetings across the week, with me as the engineer in the room. Support work is usually asynchronous: a ticket arrives, you investigate, you write back. GDC inverts all of it. A technical director describes a problem in two sentences, you ask the third question, and suddenly you’re sketching memory layouts on a notepad between sessions. The bandwidth of a face-to-face conversation still beats any ticket thread I’ve ever been part of.
What struck me most is what people ask in person. Tickets are precise and symptom-shaped: a crash, a regression, a build error. In person, studios ask strategy-shaped questions — “should we be worried about our load times at this scale?”, “how do teams like ours structure their content pipeline?” — the questions that never get filed because no single ticket contains them. My takeaway for anyone in a support role: get in front of your users when you can. A week of conversations recalibrated my sense of what actually hurts studios day-to-day, and half of my investigation backlog since then traces back to something someone said in a hallway.