Posts on Patrick McDavid

2026's Game

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve futzed with video game design in the past with my competitive multiplayer Infight, and the cutsie little handheld shooter, Princess’ Last Stand and a few other toys along the way. Last year’s Icarus was a pen and paper hit. So what’s it going to be in 2026? I want to put something new together.

Icarus: My First Game Jam

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the story of how I wrote a little piece of Sci-Fi Horror for a game jam and ended up winning some stellar awards! Read on for a casual design diary of a ship in deep shit.

Accidently Carbon-Neutral Blog

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was a big hippie in college: birks, hacky sack, environmental minor. The whole deal. I’ve never been able to marry those halcyon days to the week to week technical work I’ve spent my career doing. Today, waiting on a little technical blocker, I thought about it some and went on a green-software micro-adventure.

A little fight on Discord

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So I made a thing! I’ve wanted to build this game for over ten years. If you look through my GitHub, there’re something like six discarded attempts since the early teens. I was handed some free time over the last couple months, and found my way to picking up my most recent attempt and actually getting it up and online! Here’re some thoughts on where it came from, what it is today, and where it might go.

Single-Table Database Design

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve wanted to do this videogame for years. I’ve started it handful of times, in C#, Python, Node. Well, with some time on my hands, I finally got around to really taking a good swing at it. I started by picking up the last version of it I’d started a couple years ago. For the last two weeks, I’ve been enjoying really getting into some fullstack creation.

Playing with Computers

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I did poorly in high school. F’s finally after years of C’s and D’s coming up through junior high. Instead of homework, I spent my nights pushing my 75mhz win95 box further and further online. Geocities and early Bungie games. That phone line screamed moving bits around at 9600 baud. AOL discs piled up as I spent their promised “100 free hours” each to access the proto-internet. HTML and game-modding led to ColdFusion and IIS servers.

VisionOS is too big

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When you pull on a modern headset running VisionOS or Meta’s Android variant you get to place arbitrary software applications floating around you in space. It’s a neat effect, and promises to liberate your software from the 15" laptop in front of you or the formerly spacious monitor on your desk. Apple’s swings wildly towards freedom and chaos, Meta’s is limited and safe.

Email Authentication: Securing Digital Communication in an Insecure World

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the modern digital landscape, email remains a cornerstone of communication. However, this ubiquitous form of interaction has become a breeding ground for cybercriminals seeking to exploit vulnerabilities for malicious purposes.

Publishing Jekyll to S3 with GitHub Actions

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Blog’d been kind quiet, yeah? I picked it up to write some stuff and found that my old friend travis-ci.org wasn’t really a thing anymore. I used Travis to build and publish this site for many moons really reliably. It was one of the OG continuous integration and deployment sites out there. They went all corporate or something.

So to dodge the corpos, I threw in with Microsoft over at GitHub using their Actions platform to publish this pile of bytes you’re reading.

Game Dev with Microsoft Makecode Arcade

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My five year old has been taking some online programming classes that teach fundamentals using block programming. He’s using this awesome iPad app ScratchJr that focuses on movement and animation. It has some really neat fundamental concepts and sneaks in some clever stuff like interprocess messaging.

Software, from the heart of Colorado

Sat, 14 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Keith Reid-Cleveland with BuiltInColorado featured BombBomb and its engineering staff in a piece about our work environment, values and goals. Below is Keith’s full interview with me about the team at BombBomb and what we look for in our people, and how we’ve beaten the odds as a bootstrapped SaaS in Colorado Springs. Enjoy!

Personal Goal Sheet!

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been feeling a bit in-between lately. Maybe some goals would help?

Recruit the best with Video

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was very kindly invited to speak at DisurptHR Denver in April on the subject of using video to recruit the excellent talent. Here’s a recording of that talk!

My thesis is simply that you can do better at building relationships, trust and interest with prospects for jobs by sending video messages instead of plain text.

DVLP Denver Serverless Presentation

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite technology events, DVLP Denver was kind enough to allow me present a talk I’m pretty fond of, Serverless Hotdog Detection last fall. I was delighted to see that they posted the video of it yesterday!

Special thanks to the DVLP Denver video crew for the flattering aspect ratio! In the talk I reference this great talk from the creator of the serverless framework that I also recommend you check out! Happy geeking!

SaaStr Annual Top Ten

Wed, 13 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

SaaStr Annual is a celebration of software in the cloud, focusing on the people and the companies that’ve thrived in this new medium. It’s very much not a technology conference, per se. Instead it’s about organizing people do deliver value to customers as efficiently as possible. It’s a bit of a VC feeding frenzy as well, with a number of sessions like, “VC Confidential: This is what your VC is not telling you.” So I took away a number of product-centric ideas that I’m excited to sprinkle around BombBomb this year:

Two-Slice Software Teams

Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon’s Two-Pizza-Teams is a scaling methodology that suggests organizational designers ensure independence and speed by keeping ownership of products to teams that can be fed by no more than two pizzas. These teams need total decision-making authority of their product, and a clear understanding of what success means for them. This works well for Amazon as these small teams behave as composable units of opportunity and service for customers internal and external.

Practicing Making Choices

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

My wife Briana and I reached an impasse with our three-year-old a few weekends ago. A beautiful fall morning’s hike in the neighborhood park came to a howling halt as the tyke staged a rebellion.

Parenting challenges come in waves. You’ll find a rhythm that works, you’ll have a few weeks (maybe) of steady plodding, then wham, the kid’s a little smarter, and you have to adapt. In our turn, Briana and I had been leveling a scattershot of consequences and pleas. Some landed, some missed. Under the staring October sunshine our son had brought our family of four to a standstill.

Recruiting Top Talent with Video

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recruited more than 30 excellent software developers and other technical staff to BombBomb in the last several years. This is my first position recruiting and building teams, and I don’t think I would have been nearly as successful with it if I hadn’t been using simple one-to-one videos.

My résumé reads in large part like a software engineer, and as such I get several recruiter emails every day. They’re bad without exception. “Hey I see you have some .Net experience yada yada”. Likewise I field a few voicemails of the same kind a couple times a month. All of these go in the trash. Everyone understands how this plays out, everyone knows that’s not working.

My Thesis

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to spend a little more time reflecting on where I am, where I want to go, and where I’ve been. One of the largest single-product projects I’ve ever undertaken was my philosophy thesis, Spoken Worlds. Five months of writing to produce about 9000 words on the subject of linguistic relativism.

Linguistic relativism is an idea in linguistic philosophy whose thrust is that people’s thoughts are very much structured and confined by the language that they grow up in.

Working for the Best Company

Sat, 03 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

What’s important to you about where you work? Is it the people, the technologies, the processes? Is it success or fortune?

I’ve been interviewing technologists for the last several years and this is a conversation I’ve had time and again. As you’d expect, answers vary a lot, though there are certainly themes centered around where people are in their careers:

High performers earlier in their careers want learning and new technologies.
High performers in the middle of their careers want stability and good people around them.
Those same folks later in their careers tend to assume the former, but instead seek out hard problems.

I can now measure my career as being two decades old. I was 16 in 1998, and in lieu of pursuing my drivers licenses, I was instead trying to start a web development company. A number of now lifelong friends and I called ourselves X over Zero web technologies. A testament to our youthful idealism, we were charmed with the idea of the result of the equation X/0 being positive infinity. We had the now-defunct xoverzero.com and thought ourselves young entrepreneurs.

Podcast: Video Sales Strategies - The Bombcast!

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

BombBomb’s Bombcast invited myself and their VP of Product to talk about our Fall 2018 releases and some of the story behind them!

Beyond full stack

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is reblogged from my interview on BuiltIn Colorado

BombBomb’s video messaging app helps businesses drive sales and convert leads by building trust and engaging customers face to face — even when they can’t be physically present with a client. It’s a smooth, simple user experience that makes capturing, encoding and sending videos in real time seem easy.

The technology that makes all that possible, though, is far from simple.

Behind the scenes, BombBomb’s engineering team must go beyond full-stack development to create complex systems that work in the cloud, in bad connectivity and within single-digit seconds. We asked VP of Technology Patrick McDavid to dive into the details of BombBomb’s robust tech stack and explain both the opportunities and challenges he and his team face.

CloudFront Invalidation with TravisCI

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is reblogged from my post on the BombBomb Developer Blog

I wrote here a few months ago about Easy Cloudfront cache-busting with Travis-CI. I’d not really liked the solution I offered in that post and am back to share the far better solution I found this week, which is just about as easy!

A look back at 2017

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

2017 was a year of upheaval and growth by necessity.

At Home

It’s a girl!

Our daughter, Wren, came in May. The second child is multiplicative rather than additive, for sure. Our son was two, so we’d seen a bit of parenthood, but the new effect started on day one with our son having brought a little impetigo infection to the recovery room. Ok, so our one-hour-old has to contend with the germ warfare going on at daycare from the start? That’s new.

Monthly Hackathons at BombBomb

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Reblogged from developer.bombbomb.com

I’ve had the enormous fortune to lead an engineering organization comprised of women and men who delight in challenging one another every day. This camaraderie leads to better products, more creativity and a happier workplace. At BombBomb we often get to work on really cool stuff that pushes our ability and knowledge, but at the same time these tasks are often that: assigned work. It’s gotta be done, but how can we really lean to the other side and let engineers run wild?

NASDAQ CTO Summit

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve got a goal for 2018 to attend four tech and leadership conferences. But before we make it to 2018 I was excited to happen across the 2017 NASDAQ CTO Summit a few days before it ran. I hustled a ticket and am going to represent BombBomb in the big city.

Last year I had a really good time attending the inaugural Inman Hacker Connect. Hacker Connect was (and still is) a great opportunity to meet some other tech leaders in the real estate space specifically.

Serverless Hotdog Detection

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

_{^{Photo credit to Umai Hotdogs of Sacremento for their scrumptious looking dogs.}}

Last night I gave a talk at coloradoSprings.js about the serverless framework.

I wish I’d went to the trouble of recording the presentation, and will try that the next time I give one, but for now I can offer you the slide deck, and this quick write-up.

Hotdog Cloud?

The hottest space in tech in 2017 is inarguably hotdog detection and non-detection. Everybody’s trying to get a piece of the action. So I spent a couple nights building https://hotdog.cloud a mobile-friendly hotdog detection app. Give it a try! It’s especially good on your phone. Hotdog cloud is open sourced on github, so feel free to fork away.

The Gaia and the Hydra

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In a very beardy time, I spent a week with my man Cheech assembling some AWS infrastructure patterns into a fun global fault tolerance proof of concept project called Gaia.

This little foursome of software applications attacked and overwhelmed one another, it measured itself and in the end, danced onscreen.

Slides: Google Slides

Cheeseburger Compass

Sun, 09 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Work work…

My wife, Briana is a very talented Geographic Information Systems Analyst. That means she makes maps and massages geographic data to get clients information they needs about where in the world their projects are being undertaken.

One project involved assessing the surface area of all the parking lots belonging to a major national retailer. This project was seeded to her with some latitude/longitude pairs that were sometimes as far as a couple miles away from where the actual storefront was. This left her having to manually reconcile the addresses of these stores against where they actually were so they could go about measuring the surface area of this project.

Spoken Worlds

Wed, 11 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Introduction: Stoic Secrets

The world stares solidly at us, seemingly assured of itself, its structure and its meaning. What do we come upon as we stare back out onto it? Do the ordinary constituents of worldly experience have in themselves characters to be discovered, classified and cataloged, or are things not so straight as they seem? What shapes do these catalogs of knowledge take on when people of largely different cultures or languages construct them? Would these shapes vary enough to alter their perceivers’ experience to a point that they would be experiencing worlds different from those with other classificatory guidebooks? In this paper I will argue that people’s culture, their language, and their unique individual minds form frameworks that come to act as their real worlds. These worlds are loosely coupled to the machinations of experienced reality, but also to cultural and interpersonal influences of more fleeting and dynamic character.

OSXonIntel.com

Mon, 18 Sep 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Six months before the release of Mac OS X in 2001, some friends and I were excited about Apple’s new OS. Linux in a whiz-bang wrapper? Yes please! Being broke children we weren’t interested in the prospect of having to buy to Macs to run it.

So in September of 2000, my friends Ray and Sean and I launched OSXonIntel.com to collect petitions in that spirit. We ended up getting slashdotted, and a fair amount of press in the Apple and computing spheres.