Dev Diary: Seth “cheeseplus” Thomas

Since this is my first dev diary, I’ll start off with a bit of background and then give some of the highlights of what “build mastering” entails.

About 8 months ago I was graduating from the University of Texas, and unlike most students, I wasn’t horribly worried about hunting down a job. During my time at the university I had managed to work in several great positions within the University’s IT community, and I was ready to simply migrate to full time. Finding that first job is always supposed to be the hurdle, yet in my situation it was picking between jobs. To make matters more complicated, right as I was ready to start a career, SOE stepped into the picture. I had applied along with all the other jobs, but since it was a long shot compared to my surefire positions, I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

I was hired on as Build Master, which is a position I am still working out. The notion of having a “Build Master” isn’t all that old, but also not yet common. The idea is that someone sits outside the development itself and verifies the integrity of the process of moving the code along, in our case to the live game.

There isn’t anything one can study and precisely one book you can read on what being a Build Master is about, as it is unique to each environment. As it turns out, a wide IT background, and the brand of troubleshooting it entails, is extremely useful in the position. I work in several different environments, all with their own quirks and rules, so being the jack-of-all-trades is a must. The majority of my time is spent much like a system/network admin, putting out small fires as they pop up, but it’s my core duties that define the Build Master position.

In a previous diary, Teesquared talked about our “branches”, and I will elaborate on how I interact with them. For example when work finishes in the “current” branch, I am the one who then integrates “current” into the “test” branch. This sounds simple enough, but when dealing with the magnitude of files it can be downright scary. So I sit and make sure all the changes in one branch don’t conflict with the changes in the other, and if they do I resolve them.

This cycle of integration can happen several times during a chapter. This leads into our build system that builds these branches into workable versions of the game. Since we are always testing things, these builds are mostly automatic, with manual ones being done as needed. Keeping the build system running is one of my highest priorities so any and every hiccup is investigated and dealt with if necessary.

The build system also facilitates the deploying of builds to our internal test centers as well as TCPrime. The deployment and the health of the test centers themselves also fall under the Build Master duties. For the most part my work isn’t anything players notice — that is until I update a public test center. To be clear, I do little programming myself, only moving the code around.

Now if that makes any sense, I’ve done a half-decent job — describing the job to even immediate friends and relatives is still a challenge!

Seth “cheeseplus” Thomas

Star Wars Galaxies Build Master