After 11 years since my first internship, and 9 years full time, I’m leaving Codeplay to join AMD.

A Brief History of Codeplay and I⌗

I was a nineteen year old ned when I started my first internship at Codeplay, and was given the code-monkey job of hand optimizing shaders for an OpenGL ES 2.0 shader compiler, so that Codeplay’s compiler engineers could prove the capability of the compiler. Slated to take 10 weeks, I finished the task in 2 weeks and to stave off boredom in the remaining 8 weeks I ended up proving 100% code coverage of the compiler and writing a test generator to break it.

From these humble beginnings I came back for a second internship where I rewrote the Testplay system so that it’d work on Windows & Linux.

When I joined full time, it was with the promise that I’d be doing PlayStation 3 development. I shipped my first title (NASCAR The Game: 2011) and got to make some SPUs very happy in the process. I felt at home doing games technology, but Codeplay’s market drifted from primarily in games to doing driver development.

For 5 years I shipped ~7 OpenCL implementations in the mobile & embedded space, becoming an expert in integrating and optimization in LLVM in the process.

Then Vulkan came around, and I knew here was the thing I had been waiting for. Having worked for so long on OpenCL, the deep-seated flaws in the API were very clear to me, and I wanted to be sure that Vulkan did not make the same mistakes. After joining Khronos, I proceeded to get Vulkan 1.0 out the door, then focused primarily on getting the Vulkan 1.1 subgroup functionality shipped and into developers hands.

AMD’s Enticing Offer⌗

With my history in Vulkan & SPIR-V, and my LLVM & driver experience - AMD enticed me with an awesome job. I’d get to spend 100% of my time doing Vulkan & SPIR-V, I’d get to work on the Vulkan driver, I’d get to use my skills in LLVM, and I’d still be able to work within Khronos to get extensions and functionality that I know developers will love.

The entire brief was summed up by Rys as ‘Make things fast anywhere you want!’.

The icing on the cake was the opportunity to work for Rys Sommefeldt and closely with Timothy Lottes - two people that are legends in the industry to me.

What more was there to say other than ‘Sign me the fuck up!'

TL;DR⌗

So today, the 1st of June 2018 is my last day at Codeplay. I leave behind many friends and co-workers that I’ll naturally miss, I wish you all the best in your continuing careers!

And on the 18th June 2018 I’ll start the next chapter in my life at AMD. Super excited doesn’t begin to cover it.