Bristol, PlayStation and SN Systems

When I finished my year of travelling around South America and rejoined my partner in the UK, little beyond a destination was certain. I had seen and read about Bristol from media but it was an abstract concept to me. But the abstract appealed, the counterculture, the punks, the artistic and leftist strains that ran throughout it.

I really loved Bristol. It was the perfect size, I think, providing all the perks of city living and yet containing many of the benefits of a smaller town. I could ride for 15 minutes down the bike path and be in the heart of the city, or 30 minutes in the other and be amongst rolling fields and pastoral paradise. The abstract solidifed into a city-culture that I felt at home within, despite my immigrant status.

Of course, in that time, Covid-19 swept the world and hit the UK particularly hard. It was a strange and sad thing to see the city I had quickly fallen in love with transform into a hibernating ghost-ship. But we got through with no true loss or suffering, avoiding even getting sick, though I definitely felt isolated.

It was my absolute pleasure to work for SN Systems in this time. I didn't expect to land such an awesome role when I landed in Bristol. The fates and my priviliges carried me through. SN Systems is a subsidiary of PlayStation, and is responsible for building the developer tooling for the PlayStation platforms. This includes things like the compiler, memory profiler, CPU profiler, target management, remote viewer, everything that a developer needs to produce awesome games on the platform. I felt very lucky to be there leading up to and through the launch of the PlayStation 5 and hope that my work contributed to getting some cool games up and running on that platform.

Special thanks to everyone in my team for making it an awesome experience - everyone in the ProDG team, Chris for being an awesome manager, Oz for being a great friend. It is an experience I'll forever treasure.