About - Spirited Snowcat

Hey there!

I'm Gareth, aka. Spirited Snowcat

Thanks for taking an interest in my projects! If you’re new to my work, then here’s a little about myself:

I’m a snow leopard furry and software engineer in the game industry! I’m also a game preservation hobbyist in the Conquer Online community, a game I taught myself game server programming for.

During my college years, I made life-long friends with likeminded engineers and professors, and started multiple personal projects in live service games. The college hired me as a lead tutor and lab administrator after my second year, and I broke into the industry a year later with a paid internship working with industrial automation software.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, I eventually worked my way up to the gates of Blizzard Entertainment: the company that originally inspired my commitment to game quality and polish.

Today, I work for an undisclosed game studio working in game microservices. At the end of the day, I couldn’t be happier with my current role and where it’s taking me, and I’m so glad I took the initiative back in high school. I lead each day with a desire to continue learning and brighten the lives of players around the world through software and entertainment.

Some quick facts about me...

Grinding experience

Some places I've worked at...

Skills I spend time refining professionally and in my free time...

Highly Scalable Microservices

Game services as high availability, scalable microservices are my primary career focuses. Most of my professional and personal projects involve service APIs and game server architecture. Currently, I work on game services professionally in C# and C++, and personally in Go. My services have scaled to serve millions of requests per minute.

Big Data Analytics

Part of by background experience with business cloud software had me working on big data pipelines for call prediction machine learning using Spark and Hadoop. During this time, I wrote Jupyter notebooks for transforming raw input data from an IoT device ecosystem and extracting structured data into data lake storage solutions.

Cloud-Native APIs

The multi-tenanted game services we build and run today have transitioned away from using strongly consistent data stores with strong read and write guarantees to eventually consistent data stores with higher availability and throughput. These consistency principles also influence how I author cloud-native APIs that are both highly performant and leverage cloud scaling algorithms.

Shell Tooling

Though some of my tools explore graphical interface design, most rely on elegant command-line interfaces for script-ability. Projects posted here are usually command-line to help support graphical tools, such as game map editing. Currently, my tools are written in Go to expand on its robust networking and parallelism constructs.

What is a furry?

Furries are all over the game industry! Here's a glimpse at why...

The Furry fandom is a community of fans, artists, writers, gamers, and role players who celebrate anthropomorphic animals in media. Whether it’s for serious allegories or for lively characters, we’ve given animals human traits in storytelling for millennia. In video games, it allows us to build complex and emotional relationships with the player: empathizing with a stray cat lost in an underground robot city, cheering on an interstellar fox defending his planet nation through the cosmos, rapping with a paper flat dog awkwardly crushing on a girl flower, or laughing at the quirkiness of their animal neighbor who just gifted them a washing machine.

Furry isn’t only a celebration of these narrative tools, but a vibrant community. Lots of members in the fandom chose to make their own, elaborate animal characters and costumes called fursuits. It’s a positive, high-energy, fun display of artistic expression, but can also be therapeutic for those experimenting with gender expression or just in need of a creative, social outlet. It’s why the furry community is so strongly associated with the pride community and so body positive.

For me? I’m furry for fun! I play as a lot of anthro characters in tabletop and video games, but I also benefit from the anonymity Spirited provides me online. In that sense, Spirited is a great mascot for my game development projects. He even has his own video-game inspired theme music.

Got a burning question?

I've got answers! Here are some quick facts about me...

Why the game industry?

Games serve many purposes in modern art and entertainment. They can tell a story, invoke powerful emotions, bridge international communities, and capture a culture. The field itself comes with many challenges: from complex software system architecture to in-game microeconomics. There’s never a dull moment in developing games.

What games have you worked on?

In my previous roles, I owned game microservices and worked with game teams on integrating with them. Some of these games included: World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Diablo II Resurrected, Diablo III, Diablo Immortal, Overwatch, Warcraft III Reforged, Warcraft Arclight Rumble, Destiny 2, and Marathon.

How did you get started with programming?

I first picked up the basics using online tutorials, and then dove head first into a game server project by writing NPCs and fixing game feature bugs. The learning curve can be steep, but taking small steps at a time and breaking down problems can help you climb that hill. I eventually took myself to community college to solidify and refine those skills.

What games do you play?

I’m a huge Nintendo fan, and love playing the newest installments of Legend of Zelda, Animal Crossing, Pokémon, Mario Kart, and Super Mario! Portal and The Last Guardian have special places in my heart, but I usually play online games such as Borderlands, Diablo III, Guild Wars 2, and Sea of Thieves with my friends. I’m a very social gamer.

Why snow leopards?

Animals are globally identifiable by their unique traits and characteristics. Snow leopards started as an avatar theme to describe my online presence. Their energetic and bouncy personalities describe my social interactions pretty well. After a decade of using the ghost cat to mask my presence on forums, it became a fun online identity.

What are some of your other hobbies?

As you dig through my projects and posts, you might notice that I have a lot of hobbies. Just to name a few, I love photography, illustration, painting, 3D modeling, video production, computer hardware, gardening, home automation, and of course, playing and making games. Authoring and playing in table top campaigns also falls into that mix.