Will's Giant Bomb Engineering Update

I haven't posted here in a while but I figured I'd give an update on what's happening here in Giant Bomb engineering now that I've been here for a while (just over 5 months!) I've gotten a pretty good hang of things now and I'd like to share a few of the things on my radar lately.

So, here's what's coming soon that I've been working on. (Keep in mind this is only my personal list, we have a lot of great engineers here all working on different things and I can't speak to all of them.)

Here's my top 3:

#1 Subscriptions!

I was tasked with cleaning up our billing code and getting subscriptions working properly. Subscriptions have been a bit shakey for a while and my goal was to make them well.. work. As of this week a bunch of new code went out for subscriptions that should make things work quite a bit smoother. There's still more to come and I'm sure there will be some more things to clean up, but it's a good start at least! As a GB subscriber for years before I got a job here this is a pretty important thing to me, so I want to make sure they work right!

#2 WIKI

The wiki... well the wiki has some issues. It's big and complicated and needs some love. We have good news though! Myself and another engineer (Joe) have reserved a whole week next week to do nothing but analyze the wiki and come up with a plan to fix/rewrite it. Wiki is a big priority for us and we'll be working hard to get a hold on things. It's a big task that will take a while so wish us luck!

#3 Video player

Giant Bomb videos are unquestionably the best videos on the internet... unfortunately our video player isn't exactly the best player on the internet. We are a bit limited in what we can do with the video player because part of it is controlled by another team, but it needs a lot of love (especially on older apple and android devices.) Recently I fixed a nasty bug that caused the videos to fail on a lot of older iOS devices, but there's still a long way to go. We have a few engineers that plan on working together in an upcoming sprint to address as many issues as possible. Side note: Vinny, Drew, and Jason have been working on some of the audio syncing and encoding issues which are separate from the video player, and they've solved a bunch of them.

There are quite a few other things in my pile of issues but these are the big ones. I promise we're always working hard to keep making the site better, thanks so much for your patience, and keep giving us feedback.

Thanks everybody!

-Will

P.S. I've been working with some of you directly with subscription related problems and every single one of you has been super patient, understanding, and awesome, I really appreciate that!!!

Giant Bomb's all about that kaizen.

#2 WIKI

The wiki... well the wiki has some issues. It's big and complicated and needs some love. We have good news though! Myself and another engineer (Joe) have reserved a whole week next week to do nothing but analyze the wiki and come up with a plan to fix/rewrite it. Wiki is a big priority for us and we'll be working hard to get a hold on things. It's a big task that will take a while so wish us luck!

:O

Thanks for the update =). Glad to hear things are going well for ya! Also thank ya'll for all the hard work put into the site. Keep up the great work!

Cleaner code for cleaner living. Thanks for keeping the site healthy and fighting fit! Can't wait to see the future improvements to the wiki, video player and site as a whole.

Meanwhile, us ordinary folk down here will do our best to strengthen to community itself.

Sounds awesome, thanks for all the work!

Thanks for the update Will! Always good to hear from the development team.

Dunno whether this works for you guys time-wise as I'm sure you're super busy, but I'd love to hear from your team in a format similar to what Dave and Alexis did once or twice - a podcast of sorts with a couple of the site guys such as Jeff + Brad where you just talk about design, back-end stuff, and where you're planning to take things going forwards.

Glad to hear there's going to be some focus on the wiki. Best of luck fixing that thing!

Great work Will! I've been having some tracking problems on my end. If you can jump on that, that would be great. :D

Also emojis. We need emojis.

Also huge 800x240 animated sigs like every forum from the late 90's through the mid 2000's!

(Just kidding, never do that. Thanks Jeff for making an executive decision to ban that garbage since day one)

@wcarle: I was wondering, what would you consider to be the golden standard/(s) of internet video players.

I continue to have no idea how websites work.

So i'm glad you guys do, thanks!

@Mike: Signatures for me are a religion...

The main thing I would want is more functionality on mobile. At least some way to see the schedule.

News on the wiki! I can't wait for updates on that.

Thanks Will! Is the engineer helping you on the wiki a certain @jslack?

@csl316: Indeed, Scrum Master.

Cool to see that some improvements are coming, thanks Will!

Btw, since we're speaking of these kind of things, I have two questions:

1) Is there plans to improve search?

GB has a good and big catalogue of videos and podcasts, but searching for them is an unpleasant experience. When I need to find something on the website I have better luck using Google than the site's own search. For example, if I search for an episode of Metal Gear Scanlon 3, the results will be about wiki entries with the word "metal". Once I select the "videos" option, I get a bunch of videos of Twisted Metal, Scrap Metal and so on, not a single entry of Metal Gear Scanlon 3. This is just a loose example, but this occurs mostly when searching for specific GB-produced content.

2) What's the best way to report bugs? I'm having a few once in a while, the more often one is when the toolbar of the comment box shows up bigger and behind videos out of nowhere.

@johnymyko: To report a bug look for an existing thread in the bug reporting forum and if you can't find one make a new thread in there. Also please include some basic specs like which OS you're on and which browser you're using.

Well, as long as you're part of the glorious PC Gaming Master Race and not a filthy console peasant, I'd approve that sig.

@johnymyko:

1) Yes search improvements are coming soon actually I know @jslack has been working a lot on that lately, expect some improvements soon. That being said search is pretty difficult and we'll always be working on improving it

2) I'm glad you asked! The best way to report bugs is over here in our bug reporting forum: http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bug-reporting-33/ (include some basic info like browser OS and if you've tried disabling browser extensions)

Myself and a few other GB engineers are in there daily. If you have any specific problems with your account (eg. Lost premium access, credit card not working, etc. etc.) best to contact support directly: support@gaintbomb.com

@bisonhero:Why yes it will be @jslack he and I will be trying to wrangle this wiki nonsense.

@bobafettjm: Yep! I'll have a better picture of the wiki next week. As of now it's a pretty dark and scary black box to me.

@eccentrix:Good point, we're long overdue for some mobile redesign (I did recently add a way to view an episode listing of podcasts on mobile at least :D) Currently we are really short on designers... Like down to one... so as soon as we do some hiring we may be able to address some of that. I can do some design work myself but we really need some good designers to add the artistry (I went to engineering school not art school)

@cirdain: hmm good question... The new YouTube player is pretty good (although I realy hate annotations). I'm also a fan of the Vimeo player super high quality video and really clean.

@frobie: Steven I have faith in you I'm sure you'll figure it out

@y2ken: We've been talking about an engineering podcast and I for one am all for it. Hopefully we'll get on that soon, just a matter of finding some down time :)

Hope I answered all of your questions! Keep 'em coming if you have more!

@wcarle: I did notice the episode list on mobile. Thanks! It's appreciated.

@johnymyko: Use the bug reporting forum.

As far as search goes: When I select "video" from the search options, then add "metal gear scanlon 3", it returns all of the Metal Gear Scanlon 3 videos. Am I missing something there? Curious to know about your pain points.

Hey @wcarle, did you guys take a look at the wiki? As a longtime contributor, I was wondering what you guys identified for future improvements to the wiki.

@not_rage: Stay tuned for more info on this. I'll be posting a blog soon centering around wiki it's a big priority for us we are still discussing the scope of our work

Thank you for all your hard work back there WIl. It might not be the most obvious content on the site, but your work might be the most important and you guys don't get the recognition you deserve. Thank you.

Oh, being able to find different podcast episodes on my phone's web browser now is awesome!

Thanks for the update!

As somebody who watches videos fullscreen, I hope the new video player will be capable of hiding the mouse cursor when it's idle. Shoving it to the right side of the screen and have it stick out just a little bit ti still be noticeable is just never enough!

Over the years it seems like the wiki has progressively taken a huge backseat since GB went under one of the major redesigns (the one where Quests were taken away). I know Quests will likely never return but it bugs me when I see other major video game sites (that I don't care for) end up building a much nicer wiki section. That said, looking forward to see what the updated wiki stuff will look like!

Thanks for the update!

Kinda off topic, but I wish the live player worked better on Android. I have a nexus 9, and the chat page formats horribly. In Portrait the video is a tiny screen on the top left with a lot of unused space under it, landscape is a little bit better, but not by much. And when the video is playing concurrently with chat open it chugs pretty bad until its unwatchable (closing chat or going full screen fixes this, but then I can't see chat). Had that same problem on my nexus 7. Haven't owned an apple device in awhile, so I'm not sure if the same problem exists there.

Also, if the live player can play on Android/IOS at all, doesn't that mean there's an HTML5 version of the player? If so, shouldn't it, theoretically, work on ps4? I can watch every piece of premium content on ps4 easily, except for live videos. There's enough of those things (ps4's) out there that maybe making the live player work on it wouldnt be a fruitless endeavor not worthy of dev time

Besides these things, the site is awesome! And I admit these problems are totally minor/not picky/maybe not worth dev time.