The Past 10 Years
My last entries in my old WordPress Blog go back to 2016. My latest posts still reflect how passionate I was about StarCraft 2, until Life’s match-fixing scandal largely ruined it for me, and the very first steps of the LPLOL, the Portuguese official ERL, which is still running nowadays. But a lot goes by in 10 years. We faced a pandemic, economic crisis, the emergence of AI. Portugal’s national football team won its three first international titles. Marvel cinematic universe closed its first phase. A new Alien movie and a TV show were released. Global politics became increasingly polarized and extreme. The world has significantly changed. And, as usual, life goes on.
During that time, my career revolved much around gaming, shifting back to IT in the past years. Inygon rose to a 25 people company, running professional esports leagues in League of Legends, Counter-Strike and Valorant, esports broadcasts for some of the biggest global names in the esports industry and some of the best moments in Portuguese esports events. But, the harsh economics of the post-pandemic, paired with some unfortunate business events had a significant impact in the company’s growth. I faced some of my most difficult challenges there, trying to keep the company alive, while adapting and improving processes. That period does deserve a full post of its own, once I’m at liberty to talk about it.
Regardless of the difficulties, my time at Inygon is something I deeply value. Besides the valuable lessons you aren’t taught at the academia, Inygon presented me with the opportunity of working with some of the most talented people I’ve met, many of whom I now have the pleasure of calling friends. It also brought the chance to work at international events, work with some of the legends in the industry, and live through experiences that before I only dreamed of. Whatever the future holds, I’ll always appreciate and cherish those moments and the people that made them possible. Today, Inygon is still running its slow recovery process, with a new structure and newly developed tools.
Designing those tools weren’t easy tasks, but necessity sparks creativity and many of our best software solutions were written then. The rise of AI, namely GPT which still remains as one of my favorite LLMs, placed knowledge that was already available out there, in an easier, faster and more accessible format. To someone with ADHD like me, it was transformative. Suddenly, all documentation, for all languages, API’s, frameworks, whatever I needed, was rapidly available, with easy to understand explanations and code examples. Before AI, we had a backoffice for our operations, some broadcasting assistance software and our Inygon Play with some in-game predictions, partially mimicking a betting site, but without money involved. Now we have broadcast integrations, collectible card games with fantasy league style drafts, live animated broadcast graphics with custom in-game huds and automated overlays, AI chat moderators, and more, supported in a custom built IT infrastructure, with WAN redundancy, closed acccess circuits, traffic routing, subnet isolations and off-premise automated backups. It has been a complete tech level up.
Implementing those systems with production and staging levels, required evolving the IT infrastructure we had. Running over 20 servers, maintaining and monitoring also needed upgrading, to avoid being a workload. Ansible and Terraform became a natural part of the stack. We moved from Prometheus to Telegraf, and paired with some smart filters, machine learning and some AI, a new custom solution was designed to monitor everything in real time with alerts and quick response protocols to potential threats.
And this is where I am now. Somewhere between business and IT, gaming and coding, building on APIs to response scripts for intrusion detection. Feeling like I’m in transition to something I don’t yet know where it leads. But, if anything, these past 10 years taught me that change is the only constant, and that’s exactly what makes this next chapter exciting. Although for me it’s clear that I’m moving away from gaming and focusing more on engineering and cyber security, even though I’m still strangely connected to it, supporting Inygon and its tools, especially as some of them are gaining some international traction.
It’s really hard to say what the future holds. With AI sniping developer positions, amongst many others, we are likely heading into a decade of micro SaaS and workplace shifts and management revolutions. I’ve already seen some of this happen internally out of necessity, but as the tech improves, it will only be natural and progressively faster, to many more work positions. Coupled with the fight for fewer resources, the future is sure to bring many challenges. At this time, I won’t attempt to predict specifics, but I recommend anyone reading this to be ready to adapt. Remember, it isn’t the strongest that survives, but those quicker to adapt to change.