I was made redundant after seven years at Repeat.gg. I'm treating it as runway, not a wall.
One honest framing first. Redundancy isn't a verdict on whether you were any good, it's a business decision made a few levels above your desk, and dressing it up as either a tragedy or a secret blessing helps nobody. What I do control is what I do with the months in front of me. So here's the plan, plus a thank-you to the ride that got me here.
Employee number seven to a Sony acquisition#
I joined Repeat.gg during Covid-19 as employee number seven as a Senior Front End Developer. Back then it was a small startup with a big idea: a platform where people compete in tournaments across the games they already play and earn rewards for it. I stayed for the whole arc, from that tiny team to the day Sony Interactive Entertainment acquired us and folded us into the wider PlayStation family where I was promoted to a Fullstack Software Engineer.
Riding a company with a dev team having a single-digit headcount to a Sony acquisition isn't something you can plan, and it taught me more than any single technical decision. You watch every layer grow up at once: the codebase, the team, the on-call roster, the expectations. Things that are perfectly fine at a thousand users quietly become the thing that pages you on weekends when a much bigger crowd turns up.
The scale problems were the fun part#
We served tens of thousands of daily active users worldwide, so the interesting problems were rarely "make this button work" and usually "make this button work when a big tournament ends and thousands of people updating the scoreboards the same time." Most of that lived in an event-driven, microservices setup on Kafka, with MySQL and MongoDB behind it.
The bits I'm proudest of:
- Migrating the UI off PHP and Twig onto React, then proving out a path toward Next.js.
- Working directly with developers at Electronic Arts to debug, test and launch Battlefield into our tournaments.
- Building the original foundation for Jarvis, our internal admin tool, so support and game-admin teams could handle content, moderation, fulfilment and payments without borrowing an engineer.
- Getting flown to San Francisco to meet the wider Sony esports team and attend GDC, which is a genuinely strange and lovely thing to happen to someone who just liked making websites.
Choosing momentum over panic#
I'm running a focused five-month sprint on two tracks: the job search, and building out my skillset for the current market being well rounded and using agentic workflows for productivity. The products I build is where I'm closing the biggest gap on my CV. My career has been TypeScript, React and Node, one common half of the market. The other half, the one nearly every listing pairs it with, is C# and .NET, so I'm learning it the only way that sticks for me: building something real with my name on it. That story, including the deploy that quietly deleted my database on every push, is in Learning C# by building my portfolio in public.
What I want from the next one#
I don't know exactly what the next role looks like, but I know its shape: somewhere I can own features end to end, work on things that break in interesting ways at scale, and sit on a team that treats quality as part of the job rather than a phase bolted on at the end. Seven years in one place showed me how much compounds when you stay and go deep. I'd like to do that again somewhere new.
If you're building something like that and want a full-stack engineer who's equally at home in the frontend, the backend let's talk. You can see what I'm building at craigblunden.dev, where the goals on the homepage are, quite literally, this plan in public.