Online gaming portal

Building a social gaming platform that enables playful interaction between players worldwide is more than delivering a fun play experience — behind the scenes it's a logistical and communicative operation between dozens of people across multiple continents. On this project, developers in the Netherlands, Spain, UK, Canada, and the US worked toward the same goals at the same time.

My role inside that team focused on building the front-end SPA of the platform — the place where players land, manage accounts, find friends, launch games, and check their progress and achievements. That SPA had to integrate seamlessly with external parties from all those countries, across different time zones, different working styles, and sometimes different priorities.

Technically we worked with AngularJS 1.3, with PHP 5.6 on Silverstripe as one of the back-ends and GameSparks as the specialised layer for game data, leaderboards, and multiplayer aspects. That may sound eclectic today, but in 2015 it was a well-founded combination for what we wanted to achieve.

One of the biggest lessons was the importance of very clear contracts between teams. When three parties simultaneously work on code that meets on one screen, a vague API agreement is a ticking time bomb. We invested a lot of time sharpening those contracts — formats, error scenarios, versions, deprecation policies — and in tools to validate them.

Beyond that, tooling around asynchronous collaboration mattered more than the technology itself. Clear pull requests, small and well-described commits, and shared agreements on when something is 'done' saved hours of response time. In a project where a question on the other side of the world only gets answered the next day, clarity is money.

A complex and challenging project, and an international collaboration to look back on with pleasure. For me this was the trajectory where I really learned to work in a distributed team — a skill I've kept using on every project since.