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!!!