New bloggers

Mattias | 5 October, 2009 | 0 comments

It will be great fun to follow all the new bloggers here on bwingames.se. Unfortunately I have decided to quit blogging myself, and the decision was made based on lack of time and focus (2 small kids and a new role demands  time). I think that the new bloggers will show you all how the daily work is at bwin Games on different levels and departments. It has been good fun to share stuff on the blog, and I will surely follow the new bloggers posts here. Even if I know some of the bloggers professionally, it is always of great interest to see how they write and get insight on how they think and reason when it comes to specific work matters.

Poker - a social game

Mattias | 11 September, 2009 | 0 comments

For ten years you have been able to play poker online, I have only played for the last 5 years, and it is pretty obvious that poker is something people expect to find when looking for online entertainment.

One thing that strikes me, and it can both be a good and a bad thing, is that the poker experience online is the same wherever you choose to play. This of course helps the player getting started and easily switch between operators.

Personally I think online poker should be more of a social game than it is today. Poker is a social game, where discussing, sharing information, do your Jedi Mind Tricks or whatever will make you a better player and your stay at the table more enjoyable. Today most of the social interaction that occur during online poker play is done via a 10 row high chat box, where in worst case, the chat is mixed up with an ever flowing stream of table events. There are numerous of different poker communities where you can discuss hands played, share hand history, discuss big land based tournaments and so on. But no one of the big names in online poker offers a solid poker product where everything of that is a natural part of the game. My prediction is that online poker will look, feel and be consumed in a totally different way the coming ten years, at least I hope this is the case, as a poker player and as someone who strongly believes in poker as a social platform.

I hope and believe that we, bwin, will be a leader in the development of a poker product that will make the competition look old and give our customers a product that actually lets them play online poker the way online poker should be played.

Back at the office

Mattias | 4 September, 2009 | 0 comments

Finally I am back full-time again. The first week has been all but slow. I have started a new role at work and a lot of stuff is new, and at the same time you feel a bit over active as you have a great feeling inside wanting to deliver and do a great job directly. It is going to be good fun to get to know my new colleagues better, I know them from earlier, but have not worked that much directly with them. I hope I get a chance to change and deliver the things I feel are important. A funny thing with a new role is that you are thrown between great expectations and total confusion. It is a special feeling taking on new challenges. It is a sweet mix of entrepreneurship, slight madness and the aggregation of new knowledge.

This week has been a total mix-up of what needs to be taken care of. I have tried to set myself in on how new tools work, collect information from different departments as requirements for an upcoming project and much more. On top of that there has been hectic days at home as well, finalizing the last things on the blueprints of the house we are about to build, sick kids and a new daycare/kindergarden for the kids. The days when you yawned at 6 PM and wondered what you should do with the rest of your night are long gone.

Summer holidays

Mattias | 17 July, 2009 | 0 comments

Today is the last day at the office before going on vacation for three weeks. On Sunday I will travel down to the sunny side of Sweden, Halmstad, to join my family who is already there. I will try to just relax while on vacation, keeping e-mail contacts and internet surfing to a minimum, I have promised my wife that this year I am going to focus on the relax-part of vacation. Hopefully I will manage to read some books during the vacation; I still have 2 or 3 books of Dennis Lehane to read through.

Next week my oldest son turns three. We are going to throw him a great party at my wife’s sister’s place. This week has been filled with wish lists that need to be taken care of (Bought some of the items, but could not find any lions for a decent price).

It has been a somewhat slow last week at work with some sad news. The sad news is that a colleague of mine for the last 4,5 year has decided to move on to another job. The good thing is that I know he is going to enjoy his new job and company, and the sad part that is that he is going to be a missed team player and friend here at bwin Games. The IT-business in Sweden is not that big, so I am pretty confident that we will meet professionally before it is time for us to stop working in 30 years or so.

Nah, time to get those vacation plans implemented. Have a nice summer and see you  in august

Google OS, bwin on WSOP and my new role

Mattias | 10 July, 2009 | 0 comments

On Friday I got my new computer, a 13-inch MacBook in aluminum with the new black keyboard and touchpad. Nice little computer. Fascinating what a new Mac can do for one's mood and work ethic. But the big news in the Web world this week is, of course, that Google announces that they will release an operating system and take up the fight against Microsoft, Apple and Ubuntu. What I was most surprised about was that the operating system will not build on their mobile platform Android. All applications will be web-applications, a really good decision Google!

Main Event in WSOP enters day 2 (there are several day 1 of the WSOP because the starting field is so large that they must divide the first day into several days) and there are 10 players left in the tournament from bwin</a>, which still has the chance to become world champion in the No Limit Texas Hold 'em. Last week I wished that Daniel Negraneau and Mike Matusow would get on to the final table, but both have sadly gone out. It is going to be interesting to see if a pro or a happy amateur takes home the Main Event this year.

I am just about to run into a meeting to discuss and define the role description for my future role. I know that my new role, which I will tell you more about when it is fully official, will be really fun and give me the opportunity to influence things the way I think I do best.

WSOP and a MacBook

Mattias | 3 July, 2009 | 0 comments

Going in to the final table of the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E event at the WSOP, we hade a Swedish poker player in big chip lead. Erik Sagström held on the chip lead for a big part of the final table and ended up in third place in the most prestigious tournament in the World Series of Poker. I think Erik's achievement is one of the biggest Swedish achievements in Swedish poker history.

Today is the first day of the Main Event at the WSOP, the world's largest poker tournament, the game played is No Limit Hold'em and the buy-in is $10,000. 13 days of poker from start to final table with thousands of players. Last year, a Danish guy, Peter Eastgate, took home the victory in this prestigious event.

I will follow the Main Event via our WSOP Blog, the official WSOP site, various Twitter users and other more or less obscure sources of information I can find online. It is magical to follow this event; I really hope that one or more players sent by bwin will run deep in this tournament. If not, it would be lots of fun to see poker pros such as Daniel Negreanu or Mike Matusow at the final table. If you have the chance to see ESPN's WSOP broadcasts later this year, make sure you do not miss out the commentator Norman Chad. He is the best thing that has happened to poker on television.

A lot of things are about to happen at work, one thing I can say is that I will focus my future role and work on strategic challenges with a big focus on the end user experience. I am really looking forward to taking on these tasks and challenges together with all my talented colleagues. I believe we will do great work.

By the way, tomorrow I am going to pick up my new computer, a 13-inch MacBook Pro, really really nice.

Projects

Mattias | 26 June, 2009 | 0 comments

I had a very interesting and fruitful discussion with my boss about my future role and hopefully I can tell you more about it in a couple of weeks here. In addition it has been two weeks with a lot of things happening. We are going to build a house, so we've just moved to an apartment were we will live while building the house. Big projects at home, big projects at work. There are a lot of interesting projects coming up during the summer and fall here at bwin Games, so many (and interesting) that you wish you could be involved in them all.

On Thursday we had a "Power House Session" here at bwin Games, a big meeting with all employees with some general presentations on the company's status and future. On top of that, all  employees have a chance to get insights into the parts of the business that are not part of their daily work, by attending different types of seminars. Hopefully there will be some poker as well.

Back from JavaOne

Mattias | 12 June, 2009 | 0 comments

The JavaOne Conference in San Francisco was a success; it was very interesting to listen to all those talented people from all around the world. In general I think that the people from Google made the biggest impression on me, it seems like they have really managed to attract the best of the best; people with the most pragmatic approach to problem solving and personal skills. I think that us at bwin as well are good at finding the right mix of people. I work  with people from a lot of different backgrounds, both professional and geographical. I believe that this mix is really important when creating an organization that delivers user focused software.

This week is a very important week in the history of bwin, we launched a new poker client, with a focus on changing the way poker is played online. Good work all of you people who have built this next generation poker software and the surrounding systems.

On the agenda for the end of this week and next week is to get up to speed on some projects that are about to start, and start discussing the future of my role with my manager.

JavaOne & Bruce Springsteen

Mattias | 5 June, 2009 | 0 comments

This Monday we flew from Arlanda Stockholm, transferred in Philadelphia and then on to San Francisco where JavaOne 2009 is arranged. It will be a hectic week with a lot of interesting sessions to attend. I have chosen to focus my sessions on the web and user experience, while my colleagues from bwin have other tracks that they follow, it's really fun to sit down and share ideas and questions at lunch. An interesting thing with Java, and JavaOne is that it is a bit like a religion for many people. I try to keep a more relaxed attitude to technology, because it is only a tool used for building the products our users ultimately want to use, technology is not the most important thing, but as I said, it is a tool, among others, for building our products.

While I am in San Francisco, I miss out on a very fun week back home. This Tuesday Mozilla was on a visit to Sweden and my colleague Tim made sure that the event was held at our office in Stockholm, good work Tim. From what I have understood via Twitter and blogs, the event was very successful and people got t-shirts. Nothing pleases geeks more than free t-shirts.

But the big thing I will miss this week is, of course, Bruce Springsteen at the Stockholm Stadium on Thursday night, it was with great sadness I had to sell my ticket, I really hope my wife and our friends have a good night with Bruce.

We are a fairly large bunch of people from bwin Games here at JavaOne, according to statistics presented at the beginning of the Conference, Sweden is the 4th best represented country at JavaOne. That suggests that the Java platform is very popular in Sweden. For us at bwin the Java Platform is interesting on many levels. We use the Java Platform on many different levels of our system. From the heavy application servers that handle millions of requests and transactions to the clients our end users are using on their computers and mobile phones. So for us from bwin, events like these are very interesting to attend, and we get to listen to really talented people from the entire world. I will be back with a sum up from JavaOne next week, until then Rock On.

That's poker, baby

Mattias | 24 April, 2009 | 0 comments

This Tuesday we had a combined department meeting and poker tournament. After going through goals and upcoming strategy for the department and the company, we focused on the most important thing, poker. It is always good fun to play poker with your colleagues, as poker is a game with a lot of social aspects to it, and of course you get to trash-talk, bluff, slow-play and trap your opponents at the table. As always I played perfect poker. That is one of the cool things with poker, if you have a table of ten, all of them plays perfect if you ask them. But as poker is a game of skill with luck embedded into it, I unluckily fell at the hands of the dreaded King 2 suited. I was sitting in the cutoff position with pocket tens, I had to push as I had approximately 10 big blinds and the price of poker was going up quickly. I was almost instantly called by the button who I had covered, I was expecting to see A Q, A K or a medium pair after the blinds had folded, I was a bit confused when I saw K 2 turned up. As soon as I saw the hand I realized I was going to go out, I called the king on the river and I was left with hardly a big blind, and was out of the tournament in 11th place or something the next hand. I really like when we get together and play tournaments like these in our nice kitchen on the 11th floor with a view over Stockholm.

Another good thing with this week is the fact that I am now booked to go to JavaOne in San Fransisco in the beginning of June. I am going to focus on the sessions on RIA, Cloud Services, The Next Web and Mobile Applications. It is going to be good fun to go with some fellow colleagues. Hopefully we will be able to plan our trip and head to Vegas for a day or two after the Conference.

Open Web Presentation

Mattias | 17 April, 2009 | 0 comments

I am preparing a presentation about the "Open Web" and how it can benefit online businesses that historically have had a closed approach to data. The interesting thing with the presentation is that I have no intention of making it a tech-savvy presentation; I would rather focus on how the open web can enhance the user experience and how it can enable the business to grow faster without costing more. Hopefully I will make a good case and make people think twice on how to handle data online.

So what is the Open Web?

From my point of view, and what I will focus on in my presentation, Open Web is not a technical solution to a problem; it is more of a philosophy on how you work and relate to your business data and how it can affect the user experience of your service. Often when you start talking about opening up the web and exposing data to a third party, people tend to start to sweat as they see business secrets being used by competitors. Opening up the web does not necessarily mean giving away business critical data. If online businesses start to expose data suitable for reading, interaction and integration with other types of data from other sources, the businesses will be the long term winners. Today we see that the frontline platforms in the online world are services such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and MySpace, all of these have a user friendly interface and the possibility for third parties to consume and interact with the services using API:s, toolkits and actually changing code in the platforms. Twitter would not be as big as it is without its open data model. When ReadWriteWeb gathered data (using Twitter API) in April 2008 on what clients were used to update Twitter, 56% used the interface Twitter built, the rest used a third party software for updating their Twitter profile page. That is insane numbers, 44% of a service users were enabled by the API the service provided. I am certain Twitter could have built all those external tools, it would only have taken more time, more efforts and more focus from the key business. There are more examples on how opening up the web have enabled online services to grow with numbers not possible with a more traditional approach to how to handle and expose data.

I could go on for ages on this topic, but I have to have my presentation ready for tomorrow and hopefully I will be able get some good discussions going on the topic.

/Mattias

Role Descriptions and Eastern Egg Hunting

Mattias | 9 April, 2009 | 0 comments

This week I have worked on defining my work role description together with my manager. I believe it is an important task as it sets the agenda for a longer period of time. I am allergic to role descriptions and objectives that are vague and more or less impossible to achieve or miss. On the other hand it can be somewhat difficult to define what a typical work day looks like, and what one would like a typical work day to look like 6 months from now.

As a Lead Developer, what do I do for a living? Roughly my role has the following action points:

- Maintain and strive for long-term solutions

- Make sure we use the right tools

- Interact and network

- Guide team members

- Lead the development process

The most inspiring and interesting part of my work, as I see it, is where I get to network and join forums with people not working in IT. As I see it there is a strong need in the organization of understanding IT and maybe even more, a strong need for IT to understand the core drivers of the organization. I believe that when the organization has reached that kind of maturity it will be able to create fantastic products.

Easter holidays starts today, me and my kids have big plans for finding those hidden eggs. I have a feeling we will eat a lot of candy before this holiday is over.

/Mattias

Poker, short-term goals and small children

Mattias | 7 April, 2009 | 0 comments

This is my first post on this blog, I have to find the right level, and that may take a post or two to find. Kamil and Fredrik are doing a great job describing a "typical" trainee-at-work-week. I have been working for this company for over four years in different roles and when I was asked if I would like to start blogging, I was glad to and answered yes immediately. I am definitely for an open web dialogue and feel that "corporate"-blogging is a powerful tool to get your words and ideas out, and at the same time show the world the inside of your organization.

Today I work as a Lead Developer in a department with a historically strong web-focus, now taking on a wider variety of projects with focus to create better software that enhances the user experience for the poker player. On this blog I will focus on what a typical working week may look like and my ideas on how development departments should evolve in order to better meet the requirements set by the business owners. Last but not least, I will try to give you a look into the most important part of my life, being a father, and how important it is with flexibility in your work life when you have small children.

Earlier this year I had discussions with Product Management, regarding what areas and challenges we need to address in a short term, mid term and long term perspective. This week I will focus, together with a colleague, on defining how we can solve short term challenges and still be in line for the long term goals. This is the best part of my work, where I get to use mine and my colleagues’ skills (not only technical) to solve the actual challenges and requirements that are defined by the product managers. I am certain that we will do a great job on this and be able to present the best possible solution at the end of the week.

Another dimension of my work is the fact that I am a father of two and I currently work part time since I am on parental leave. I am glad that bwin Games has managed to create such a flexible environment for us with small kids at home. When I first started here there were few parents around, but now bwin Games is a company with a lot of parents, and I have seen a lot of improvements the last year on benefits and policies. I hope that all parents with small children have the same support as we have do here at bwin Games.

/Mattias