Matt Hackmann

It's been quite some time. About a month and a half, apparently. Now that I'm slowly easing into life in Cali, it's time for the Accountability Report to return. Posts about me living here, the process of getting here, and the LinkedIn story will come at some time.

Health - There are certainly some interesting developments here. On the food front, I'm eating probably the largest variety of food I ever have thanks to the company provided lunches. My vegetable consumption is definitely through the roof. I'm staying hydrated with water, green tea, and fruit juices thanks again to the good folks who employ me. The downside is, they also provide unlimited free sugary snacks such as peanut M&Ms and yogurt pretzels. I am weak to these items and have caved on a few occasions. My plan for this going forward is to eat some fruit (also company provided) when I feel the craving for something sweet. At home, the story is a bit different. My kitchen is 100% up to speed, so it's been a lot of frozen pizzas, peanut butter sammiches, and fried potatoes... also, there's a Taco Bell three minute's walking distance from me... and a 7-11 one and half minutes walking distance with many tasty sugary goods. Not eating at these places is going to be an exercise in will power.

Will power is a nice segue into exercise. I made the 1700 mile journey from my home with my bike strapped to the back of my car with the intention of using it as transportation for my daily commute. And I have indeed done that for a select few days. However, I'm finding it harder and harder to motivate myself to exert this much effort early in the morning. Having a bike tire go flat and the bad tire that caused it has not helped. Short story made shorter, I need to stop being lazy.

Finances - This has been ever present on my mind since my last day at Griffin. Moving has been no cheap task and my money reserves have been draining quite quickly. Higher rent, the cost of shipping my stuff out west, and the gas burned to get here are the biggest offenders, but also the lackluster final paycheck threw off the balance. Luckily, my first LI check and relocation money should be arriving soon and I will at least not have to worry about whether all the bills will get paid. If you read the paragraphs above, you know I don't have any fears about keeping fed. But, when that money does come in, a lot of it will be sunk into furniture-ing up my apartment as most of it was left behind. Also, that trip to Japan is going to be a huge cash suck. I think given a month or two, my financial outlook will be looking much, much better though and I should be able to hit all the goals I set out for in the beginning of the year.

Japanese - With stability comes free time for me to again pick up the reigns of foreign language study. My intent was to have a better working knowledge for the trip, but that hasn't panned out due to my own laziness and the craziness of the situation around me. I'm sad to say that my brother, who took his first college course on the subject, is now far more fluent in the language than I. くそ！

So, the reports to come should be interesting as I think my life stage has aligned itself with my intended goals. All I need to do is get my fat, lazy ass in gear and act upon them.

With the eve of my big move fast approaching, I have been saying my farewells and with it comes a phrase that is becoming quite tiresome.

How do you feel?

Unlike Spock in Star Trek IV, I understand the question fine. However, my answer is the same. I don't really have one.

Moving several states west is, indeed, a very large "life event" and I am fully aware of this. Working for the company running the fourteenth most visited website in the world is no small thing to sneeze at. This is essentially my dream coming true: living in Silicon Valley making a living programming. I've only wanted this for a very, very long time.

And yet, I don't have any strong feelings about this. My general response thus far has been "I don't think it's hit me yet".

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm very excited that this opportunity has landed in my lap. As stated, it is my dream come true (at least, one of them). Being able to essentially start my life on a clean slate is certainly appealing and the potential for the future is quite bright.

To that end, I'm also saddened that I have to leave such wonderful people behind. My family and all the friends that I've made over the past few years are no longer going to be within quick driving distance. The "clean slate" I mentioned will apply here as well, moving into a state I don't know, full of people I don't know, and a culture that is going to baffle the crap out of this Oklahoma native.

But, I don't feel very strongly any of these emotions. It could very well be that the gravity of the adventure before me hasn't wormed its way from the conscious part of my brain to the emotion part. But, as I was driving back from my good-bye visit to my family, I had another thought.

I'm ready.

Everything I've done up to this point - starting from about the time I started working on YPN in earnest - has been to break into "the industry". I had my shot back in 2009 when I interviewed at Digg, but looking back, I was nowhere near ready, neither as a developer nor as a person. Since then, I've slowly acquired knowledge on both fronts, honing my craft, making friends and learning to better interface with people on a professional and personal level, and just learning how to live in general. It's been a slow but steady ascent to where I am now and every little experience has prepared me for what I'm about to do.

LinkedIn and California... I'm ready for you.

Many years ago, right before I graduated, some of my fellow graduates and myself were asked to impart any knowledge we'd gleaned from the previous two years upon a class full of freshmen. I said something to the following effect:

The Internet. If you make something, put in on the Internet. I don't care where, I don't care how. Get yourself and your work out there. Spam it on Facebook, announce it on twitter. Make as much noise as you can because you never know who might be looking.

My reasoning for such a bold statement is that twice during my tenure at Full Sail, I had been noticed by entirely random people for various personal projects I had done. One was from the head of the Madden series at EA when he ran across my Rock Band drums thing, another from a company in Chicago who had run across my deviantArt profile (I actually made money off of that one). The point being, by making public everything I worked on, I was (almost) passively setting up a portfolio of work that could be stumbled across by anybody in the world at any time.

And if you think I stopped after I got my job, then you obviously don't know me or follow me on any of the various social media avenues. Even if I make something that isn't necessarily portfolio worthy, if I've done something mildly interesting, it finds a home here, on my GitHub profile, or where ever might be a fitting spot. I even dig up and post past projects, because it can give a frame of reference from where I've come and how my abilities have evolved.

Of course, just uploading things by itself only gets a person so far. You have to advertise it somewhere. These days, my most vocal platforms are Facebook and reddit, especially reddit, or /r/awwnime in particular. There's actually a method to that madness beyond making a life of posting cute anime artwork simpler; namely, engaging directly with an audience to gauge need and resolve issues.

My work on awwnime is not the first time I've done this. There are quite a few projects of mine that started out as just something to entertain me or make my life simpler in some way, generally pretty niche projects. But, I would then find an audience for these things. A good instance would be my Tetris Attack game back in 2005. I wanted to ensure that I was being as accurate as I could and also squashing as many bugs as possible. The person writing the code is the worst one to do debugging, generally. So I tossed this out to the guys at the tetrisattack.net forums and got way more response than I could have imagined. This has happened time and again. Animal Crossing Pattern Designer, MP Skin Studio, all the various YPN engine incarnations, all projects that eventually got to the masses and various levels of "acclaim". Without even really trying, I was building a public history that could prove that I at least know something about my craft while at the same time building my ability to work with people and resolve issues.

Fast forward to the present where I'm on the cusp of working for a major player in the Internet sector, and I know that all those years of tossing stupid projects to the masses, spamming the shit out of this blog on twitter and Facebook, keeping all my social profiles up to date, and just engaging with a larger audience be it relevant to anything at all has lead me to where I am today. You never know who is going to be looking at this stuff.

Make it public, make it awesome.

Instead of packing my shit for the move to "Cali", I've been doing not much and also watching TV and movies. I may have stated earlier, but the Breakfast Club is almost wholly responsible for the creation of whatshouldmattwatch.com, and I finally just bought a copy and watched it. I feel that I will not be able to adequately review this movie because there is simply so much going on. To that point, I don't think a single watching is sufficient to really pick up on everything this movie has to offer. So, what I will do is offer my brief synopsis (as useful or not as it may be) and then muse about my thoughts on each character (hence the title of this post). Critical review really is not my forte and I don't want to try and pretend that I can.

Early one Saturday morning, five students find themselves stuck in detention for the remainder of the day. Seemingly, each person is of a different high school character archetype: the athlete, the criminal, the basket case, the brain, and the princess. Throughout the course of the day, each person gives up (willingly or not) details about their lives and all is not necessarily as it seems with the fronts they put up.Read More

I don't know why, but for the last several months I've had this odd hankering to watch the old 1992 Disney animated classic, Aladdin. Sometimes while driving home from work in my car I'll burst out into a song from the flick. I even braved the children's section of the library once in an attempt to snag a copy. (This is a thing I will never do again unless I am accompanied by a child; it felt awkward). So, knowing that my folks had a copy and that I'd be joining them for Easter, I put out the proposal that we watch after our ham riddled feasting. This would be my first time watching through the eyes of and adult and the first time I'd seen it in at least fifteen years.

The plot isn't really something I should have to synopsize, but I'll do so anyway. Set ten thousand years in the future in the fictional Arabian city of Agrabah, there is a magical lamp in which resides a genie who can grant (almost) any three wishes to the person who rubs said lamp. Antagonist Jafar is seeking it, seeking it, all his thought is bent on it for he wants to rule the world. Aladdin is a poor, thieving, and horny teenager who, as it turns out, is the only guy who can retrieve the lamp from its resting place in the Cave of Wonders. Along the way, he runs into a runaway Princess Jasmine who is also horny and tired of her life. Long story short, Aladdin gets the lamp and hijinks ensue.

Thematically, the movie seems to be about being unsatisfied with life. All of our characters yearn for something more from life but are "trapped" in their situations. Aladdin's poor and I guess doesn't want to get a job. Jasmine is sick of having her father and the law dictate her life. Similarly, Jafar is also bound by the Sultan's rule and just wants to watch the world burn. And, finally, the Genie would rather not be at the beck and call of whomever rubs his tiny dwelling.

Let the musing begin.Read More