News and Commentary

April 10th 2024
Today just started, I'm still up from the busy afternoon of the 9th.  Fallout the TV show is about to release so I'll have something to distract me from my now disrupted schedule and plans.

I was let go from my primary job a day ago.

I had no idea.  They had emailed an older email account of mine.   My manager didn't talk to me anymore and frankly they didn't actually have any real work for me.  I was in a dead role, no idea why they did that to me, but here we are.

Rack Em Stack Em Game, a data center simulator.

This game has been eating my free time thoughts since around covid hit.  2020 was crazy.  I was still working for Northrop Grumman Space Systems Division deploying god knows what, upgrading who knows what, and plugging in all sorts of cables while trying to ensure the place i managed didn't catch fire from overheating.  It was a crazy place, crazy time, and i got to play with a lot of very expensive equipment.

We had just moved to a new house, closer to work to reduce my response time down from an hour to thirty minutes to ensure the effort I supported was always covered.  I took my responsibility as a network and infrastructure manager very seriously at all the roles i've served.  Some places it doesn't work out due to a disconnect between the org's expectations and mine, or if coworkers decide to not integrate me I move on.  At that particular job I was integrated pretty quickly and when covid hit i just became the onsite go to for all the needs of our specific effort up until a certain point.

I did the same thing at all sorts of organizations over the years.  The sense of system ownership, maintaining stability while growing the production or lab system was always on my mind.  Drafting intrecate plans for infrastructure, redrafting plans, finalizing a build plan, unboxing equipment, stacking equipment, racking equipment, cabling it, powering it on, comissioning it, testing failover functions, and releasing it to the users was all i did for most of my civilian career.  And it was what I enjoyed.  Seeing, hearing, smelling racks of gear spin up was my lifeblood.

eventually i would get to a steady state at each org, or a state where my influence isn't being taken into account, and I'd leave.

I don't stay at places where I'm not valued.  I dont stay at places where my input is dumped.  This time was different, but unfortunately for the wrong reasons.

But it waas GETTING to do things in places without windows, seeing those 1s and 0s fly on command line, the status messages of interface vlan blah up state made me CHEER with happiness.

Seeing core routers boot for the first time, load config, and ping a destination just felt great.  It validated my technical training in the military, high school, and all of the days and nights i'd stayed up supporting past customers and organizations.

It gave me purpose.  It gave me passion.

That's when i realized the vision that is my game.  See the true vision of my game isn't shown yet.  I may have leaked aspects of it at some point, but the distant end after steady state of alpha is going strong and I can onboard a team the bigger picture will get unlocked.

Nobody has done what I plan to do.  Nobody has dared to do what i want to do.

Are there games that could be considered better or at a bigger scale? sure.  Are they what I want to bring to the table? no, absolutely not.

As i promised several of my core followers of the project a few days ago, I'll repeat here.  I am going to make this game a reality.  I want people to have fun and experience what it's  like to work in the tech world, without having to have the technical background and enjoy it with friends if they wish.

That is my hope and dream for this game, and I am very close to making it a full reality for folks.

- Fire Squirrel aka DC Uplink