Join Judy Tyrer as she shares some of her industry “war-stories” working on multiplayer games and how to plan for scale, what scale means in terms of deployment, and more!

About Erik Sebellin-Ross

Judy Tyrer would have decided to become a game developer had she known that was an option at the age of 9 when she tried to figure out how to build a robot that would play games with her. She did not succeed, but her passion for games never faltered. After graduating from SMU with a double major in English Literature and Secondary Education, Judy started in the Serious Games Business at Control Data Corporation where she had the unique privilege of working on PLATO, a computer based education system.

From there Judy moved into the computer industry working on distributed UNIX operating systems, specializing in File Systems. During this time she served on the File System Committee for the Open Software Consortium and published a USENET paper on “Adding Tightly Consistent Replication to OSF’s DFS”.

During the era of rampant job outsourcing which decimated the enterprise software industry in the US, Judy decided to go back to her game playing robot fantasies and joined the game industry working at Ubisoft on the Ghost Recon series as a networking engineer and multiplayer engine specialist. From Ubisoft, Judy moved to Sony Online Entertainment as Lead Engineer for Magic the Gathering: Tactics. She was then tapped by Linden Labs as Senior Engineering Manager of the Engine Room, the team responsible for server related software and simulations for Second Life.