The Clean Exit and the Walking Corpse

I learned cloud infrastructure, keeping a walking corpse on its feet. The game had 2.4 million DAU when I inherited it. The economy had been flooded with free gold right before the handoff — not to help the game, but to make the exit look clean.

Nobody spends real money when they’re swimming in currency, which made it impossible to salvage.

I managed 300 servers on AWS and responded to data center failures at 4 a.m., including one during my honeymoon. For nearly a year, single-handedly, I kept a product that couldn’t be salvaged from ever going dark.

A few years later, at a new studio, I was writing daily quizzes. Not as a product, but as probes. We were workshopping game ideas, measuring virality.

Each morning, I’d pull yesterday’s numbers, recalibrate the analytics, and A/B test a new angle. We’d iterate for months until the signal was strong enough, then build a game around it. It taught me something I’d never practiced at scale: product thinking as a daily loop — measuring resonance before committing to build.

In tech, your history often doesn’t travel. Every new room, you start at zero in someone’s eyes. You were an engineer, a designer, or a product thinker, one slice of yourself sometimes on a dead road already mapped out.

The system preferred it that way: easier to schedule, easier to replace, easier to stack rank. What it couldn’t schedule was the part that actually mattered — the ownership, the agency, the willingness to care about something beyond your own lane. When you constrain a person to a tidy HR-sanctioned role, everything else they have to offer has nowhere to go.

This past year, for the first time in decades, I was whole again and knew it. We are more than the roles we’re handed. A game almost in the app store is my proof: built by the multimedia pioneer whose work lined store shelves, the animation ringer who built a screensaver in six weeks that helped sell a startup for $38 million, the SRE who single-handedly kept a walking corpse with 2.4M players on its feet, and the product thinker who learned to measure resonance before committing to build.