Yesterday here in Silicon Valley we had the privilege of meeting Jon Parise, who gave a talk about his experience as a software engineer in the games industry. His talk was the first of the semester in a series of talks given by industry veterans to us SV students.

Jon, an ETC alum (class of 2003), is currently a senior engineer at Booyah, a small social games company with two titles currently available: An iPhone game called myTown, and a facebook game called Nightclub City. Before joining Booyah, Jon worked briefly at Brightkite, another small software company developing a social networking application for smart phones. Between graduating from the ETC and starting at Brightkite, Jon worked at Electronic Arts on a number of projects, including The Sims Online, Ultima Online, The Lord of the Rings: The White Council, and The Sims 3. He has also contributed to several books, including Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2.

In his talk, Jon discussed many of his insights gained from working in the industry, including the pros and cons of small companies and big companies (at small companies you have a bigger contribution to the end product, but it is much less risky and stressful to work at a big company), why he left Brightkite after only two months (wanted to get back into games), and what he thought was the greatest deficiency of ETC students entering the industry (communication… not so much presentations, but interpersonal communication and conflict resolution).

ETC students in particular should also be interested to know that Jon was one of the engineers originally responsible for helping make Panda3D usable by ETC students. Panda3D is of course still used by ETC students in BVW to this day. His other ETC projects included musical projects for the Jam-O-Drum, interactive real-time motion capture, and Virpets, a real-time virtual puppeteering system.

So, thanks to Jon for his enjoyable and insightful lecture. It was a very successful first-lecture, and we hope he will return next semester!