Back in 2010 when I was in my second year of Applied Informatics at a university I played WoW a lot. Specifically on a free server TwinStar. Free server generally means you are going to use an official game client but the backend is built from ground up (at first it was based on Trinity Core). To be honest quaility of the server was not good at the beginning. So I decided to contact the TwinStar team and started to help them with fixes and improvements. Work consisted of programming in C++ (server core and complex behaviour scripts) and SQL (world content and simple scripts). We also did some reverse engineering of the client app (data mining) and sniffing communication between client and server. Fun stuff. You could feel those improvements as you could play through them yourself.

After a year or so I picked up another project. A company web presentation with a custom CMS and DMS system on the backend. I was captivated by web development since we scratched its surface during highschool and this was a great opportunity to learn more. I have used a server-side page rendering using PHP, Nette framework, Latte templating engine, Dibi database layer and other technologies.

In the spring of 2012 me and my friend Jakub said to ourselves: Why don't we make a game? It's a great time for us - we love games, we love coding and we have some spare time during college. Let's team-up and make it happen! And so we started working on Orbital Devastation. We didn't have much experience but we had passion. I was learning C# at that time so we picked that as a programming language. And as for the learning experience we intentionally didn't pick up any game framework or engine. We have started from the ground - building engine, rendering, scene objects, AI scripts, UI, networking (multiplayer - yeah!), shaders, collision detection... We also touched other areas as we had to make our own textures, sprites, sounds. Even though we never completely finished it - it is still a playable alpha version with working bots, matchmaking, tournaments with up to six players, dedicated server, own lobby and a lot of assets. Just try it yourself, it doesn't even require installing - just download and run! We were working on it for about 16 months and with over 1200 commits I am proud of what we managed to create.

In 2013 I worked for a half a year on an eshop-like project which featured community-created art selling. It was a PHP website based on PrestaShop. Sadly it didn't make it to the production phase. But I swear it wasn't my fault 😀.

After the last project I have returned to TwinStar. This time I was asked to pick up their major web projects and to push them up and beyond. Those projects are TwinHEAD and Armory.

• Armory is a website showcasing all players' characters with their equipment, achievements, stats, PvP rankings and much more. Site is written in PHP and behaves as an API providing character data in XML format from live databases. Raw XML data is then processed in a browser using XSLT templates which creates an HTML page as a result. While this may seem as a good idea (client rendering, separation of concerns - data vs view) it is a nightmare to maintain and extend as you can't easily debug it and find the problem. Can't recommend it for bigger projects. It is based on wowarmory project.
• TwinHEAD is the second website. It serves mainly two purposes: searchable database of everything in game (items, NPCs, spells, locations, achievements, dungeons...) and bugtracker which we built from ground up, connected it to previously mentioned database and tailored it for our specific needs. It is based on AoWoW project. Pages are mostly generated in PHP backend and partially constructed by JavaScript on client (tables and other more interactive bits). I have rewritten the site to use MVC architecture for better separation of concerns. It also employs Smarty 3 templating engine for view separation. Biggest challenges were: adding support for three latest game datadiscs (which required data mining from newer client apps and from other sources), creation of bugtracker and integration to other TwinStar services and infrastructure.

I have worked for Twinstar on-and-off for eight years.

In 2014 I have graduated from college and landed a fulltime job - junior fullstack developer in TescoSW. The product is labeled as an "enterprise information system" and I have become a member of a team working on an in-house built framework which most of the company's products are using. Framework is based on a model-driven architecture and contains many tools for automatization and also a custom WYSIWYG GUI editor. Backend consists of multiple services (application service, cryptography, autentization, DMS...) and custom ORM. Everything written mostly in C#. There are also many client apps consuming these APIs and I have started to work on a client in the Silverlight technology. It is something like a WPF app run in a browser in the .NET runtime provided by the Silverlight plugin (Heard of FlashPlayer? This is the Microsoft's clone.).

After a year or two I have moved from backend and Silverlight to the development of a brand new SPA HTML5 client written in TypeScript. Client app is a part of the framework. The app basically just takes a definition of a page created in WYSIWYG editor and business data and renders interactive web page in the browser. Without any coding.

Shortly after the transition I have taken up a role of a frontend software designer which included responsibilities like definition of used technologies and principles used throughout the codebase and also management responsibilities regarding other developers working on the codebase.

SPAs are fun. It is a really challenging area as it is nowadays becoming as complex as the backend might be. But on the other hand you can create an app which is really ergonomic and great to work with. And you can feel it and users can feel it. We are using the newest technologies and bleeding-edge features introduced in browsers like Service Worker, Web Workers, Web Components and others. Lately we are transitioning from vanilla JavaScript and Custom Elements to React components and Redux state management.

I believe in web technologies, they will be with us for a long time.