the2bears.aboutMe()

LittleBear says: “It's six dozen of one, half of the other.”

aboutMe()

games()

I'm William Swaney, a senior software engineer at Kayak Interactive where we've created a platform for multiplayer games. For games on mobile phones. This is an incredibly hard set of problems to solve, due to the distributed nature of the phones, the latency of the communication, and the fragile nature of the connection.

So it's a good thing I have an extensive background in distributed computing having worked with Jini for the last four years or so. In fact I came to Princeton, NJ to work with Valaran Corporation because at that time they were one of the few companies I could find who were using Jini. I came to help them connect mobile devices to the Jini network and did the first implementation of the Surrogate architecture there. Then I got a thought... this stuff would be great for multiplayer games. A few of us got together and started talking about this more and more. So I wrote a couple articles that appeared in The Java Developer's Journal on the subject. I started working with some other very good Valaran engineers on a prototype and here we are, a few years later, an offspring of Valaran with our own funding. What a cool job.

Getting to Princeton is a long story. It kind of came about because I was living and working in Taipei, Taiwan. It was there I discovered Jini, by first using JavaSpaces in a project. But I wouldn't have ended up in Taipei if I hadn't met my wife, Tsai Hui-Min on the Internet. Good thing she was looking for a Canadian guy. Yes, it's true. I'm a hoser working in Jersey. With a mortgage, a talented wife (as you saw from her website), and a great son, Charles Jr., aka Charlie, CJ, Shih Cha-Chi, or BoDa.

If you wish to contact me, here's my email address: wrs((at))the2bears((dot))com. If you can't figure out that email, well... you need to turn your computer off, put it back in its box, and take it back to the store you bought it at.

Here's a link to my CV.