My first post! I’ve been thinking of starting a blog for many weeks now and I finally did it. Welcome to my blog!
Why did I decide to take this on? What will I write about? I’ll try to answer these in this post.
I have written a little about my background on the About page. My journey and experiences along the way made for an interesting ride. I learned about so many things, from programming to management of teams. I worked with teams of varying sizes, with people from all over the world and with different backgrounds and skillsets. I learned from senior and experienced people and also from newcomers to the industry.
When I started in this industry, fresh out of school after completing my Master’s degree, I didn’t know the first thing about making video games. I worked the first 6 months as an intern, eventually becoming a fulltime employee. I eventually found my way to working at Ubisoft Montreal with the Presentation (UI) team on Assassin’s Creed 2. I returned to Toronto soon after Ubisoft’s new Toronto studio was announced and worked there for the next 11 years on a number of different IPs. I saw the studio and its teams built from the ground up, met and worked with incredibly smart and skilled people over the years. I progressed in my career from intern to team lead to now architect/director at Prodigy Education.
I learned so much over the last several years, including about video games in general, game programming, cross-disciplinary collaboration, personnel management. I presented my experience on becoming a new manager and lead without any formal training at GDC Europe in 2016. The response and interest in my talk was much more than I had expected. I gave more presentations on the topic, spoke with students from local colleges in various events, sat on a panel to speak to young girls who visited the Ubisoft Toronto studio with the Girls Learning Code program. I was part of the Ubisoft Women’s Day panel hosted at the Ubi TO studio on International Women’s Day.
These and many other experiences got me thinking about all the questions I’ve been asked over the years related to career progression, management, being a woman in a traditionally male-dominated industry…the list is long. I came to realize the importance and impact of good leadership on a company’s health and success and its team’s wellbeing and success. Thus this blog came about, fueled by my desire to share my knowledge and experience with the aim to help those just starting out in their careers to find their footing, and also those who have been around for a while and find themselves struggling with issues similar to the ones I struggled with.
Some of my blog posts will be about what I have learned about leadership. Others will be on video game programming topics. As I spent several years on UI teams, I hope to share interesting information about that domain.
Thank you for visiting my blog and for getting to know me a little bit. I hope some of my writings resonate with you. Do share your thoughts and also let me know if there is a particular topic you would like me to write about. I am humbled and excited to present this blog. Do bookmark my page and visit often.
Happy reading!