Helping shape our live game operations as a Backend Engineer

It’s Time for Talent – with Tamás László

Hi, my name is Tamás, it’s nice to e-meet you! 👋

I joined Tactile at the beginning of September 2024 as a Backend Engineer. I am working on the LiveOps side of our games, which is where we continuously update the games, create tournaments and other in-game events, and it is also where the games communicate with our databases.

🌱 Before Tactile

I was a wayward child and was not into computer science at all. After I got my degree in plant protection, I felt like the geek in me wanted to surface, so I started to learn programming. Then Covid hit, so it was the perfect time to bunker in and go all in with the help of a coding bootcamp.

After that I found my footing in the tech workspace. I first worked for a small company and later a bigger, multinational company as a Backend Engineer for web applications. Since I’ve been a gamer for most of my life, when I saw that Tactile is hiring developers with web development experience, I knew that it would be a dream to get the job – even though I had no idea what LiveOps is 😀

💜 Joining Tactile

The first couple of months was a tsunami of information since the domain at Tactile is so specific to the mobile games industry. There were a lot of concepts to learn, even if the actual work that I do is very similar to my previous web development experience. On top of that, I also relocated to Denmark, so there were a lot of things to discover and get familiar with within a short amount of time. Luckily, Tactile supported me a lot in this period.

This is going to be the biggest cliché, but one of the biggest highlights of working at Tactile is definitely the people. On day one, I might have felt like the least qualified person in the room (which can be a good thing in itself!), but everyone on my team was very friendly and welcoming, so I instantly felt like I belonged.

I have been here for eight months now and I have grown a lot, but I also still have some way to go. Having said that, I do truly feel like I am a part of the team and can bring my own ideas to the table. A recurring theme I noticed is that the company is still growing and we have ambitious plans which will shape how we build our services (not to give away any spoilers 🤫). It’s pretty cool to be able to learn together with a bunch of motivated colleagues about a topic none of us are that familiar with (yet).

💪 Having an impact

As I mentioned before, my team maintains the LiveOps part of the games, which is – explained very simply – a tool for our product teams to create events in the games. This tool, written in React.js and Node.js, also enables them to interact with our players via push notifications or support messages, along with a bunch of other things. On the other side of all of this, our games are communicating with the shared backend, which we develop, in order to get all the data that needs to be shared between the different systems and devices.

My favorite part of working with the LiveOps team is that we harbor a very professional attitude towards programming while maintaining a light hearted atmosphere and having loads of good laughs.

To elaborate on what I mean by that, we have weekly meetings to align on coding standards and to help each other with solving issues which we’re currently facing. We hold book clubs to keep ourselves up to date and keep flames of motivation blazing. We believe in going well instead of going fast, and we assign resources to improve the quality of our codebase well ahead of time, not when the walls start to crumble.

🚀 What can you do at Tactile that you can’t do elsewhere

One thing that sets us apart from other companies is definitely the amount of cake we consume on our floor – it probably goes well beyond the industry standard 🤣 I would say that Tactile is a very good place to bring out the best in you. In my experience, we take our profession seriously, but nobody tries to act like they are better than the others, which creates a space where you can safely share your ideas and be a part of the team, not just a cog in the wheel.

💡 The keys to success

I believe that now more than ever, it’s important to have a good understanding of how systems work, instead of what is the syntax of the latest JavaScript framework. I believe that most workplaces look for this at the moment, since anybody can ask any large language model to build the next GTA, but if you don’t know how it should work, you probably wouldn’t get very far.