This one made me smile. Derin Halil has a habit of asking the question most of us only think: why me? He even asked it out loud, swivelling round in his chair to put it to his head of design. Underneath the laugh is a real story about imposter syndrome, meditations on being lucky, and about finding the kind of work your brain was built for.

It also landed for me personally. Derin's moment of wondering whether he was any good, or just good at one studio, is exactly where I was after eleven years at Sony Cambridge.

Highlights

• Growing up in a big gaming household, and why his mum saw games as the best bargain going
• How a physics degree, not a games course, ended up shaping his systems design
• A four-hour round trip commute for one week of QA work experience, at fifteen
• The job interview where the interviewer told him to take the other offer
• The website feature he pitched in an interview, didn't get the job for, and then saw go live six months later
• Seven and a half years on Elite Dangerous, and why he still had to leave

Give it a listen. It's one of the most honest takes on "luck" we've had on the show.

• Spotify
• Patreon
• ⁠RSS⁠
• ⁠Instagram⁠
• ⁠Bluesky⁠
• ⁠YouTube⁠
• ⁠Blog⁠
• Newsletter
• Email: DevToDevPodcast@Gmail.com

• https://bsky.app/profile/derinahalil.bsky.social
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/derinhalil

For this week Dev to Dev is exploring another themed episode, this time from Season 01 around the theme of “Leaping First” — it's three people who all did the same reckless, brave thing: they leapt into a role before it was fully formed, and figured out the rest by doing it.

Highlights:

• Matthew Brunhofer went to LA to write for WWE, took a Square Enix QA contract to pay rent, and felt more at home there than he expected to.
• Joel Morillo bet three years of his post-Navy life on being a creative, moved coast to coast for it, and talked his way into defining a role called "camera designer."
• Nick Heindl got offered a job title he'd never heard of, felt insulted by it, and ended up spending years building an accessibility career nobody had asked him for.

These selections from each episode have some great insight into how to take a leap for a role and make it your own — you'll want to hear how differently each of them describes the exact same kind of jump.

The full conversations are available on Dev to Dev’s Patreon.

• Spotify
• Patreon
• ⁠RSS⁠
• ⁠Instagram⁠
• ⁠Bluesky⁠
• ⁠YouTube⁠
• ⁠Blog⁠
• Email: DevToDevPodcast@Gmail.com

• Matt Brunhofer
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbrunhofer
• Joel Morillo
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-morillo-58861395/
• Nick Heindl
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-heindl/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsulman/
• https://www.instagram.com/pelicanpeculiar/
• https://www.alexsulmanportfolio.net/
• https://bsky.app/profile/peculiarpelican.bsky.social

For this revisit of a Dev to Dev episode from S01, I’m going back to the wonderful discussion I had with Landon Hood.

Landon and I go back, and getting to sit down with him for Dev to Dev felt like catching up with an old friend as much as recording an episode.

Landon was a franchise producer at Blizzard at the time (he’s now Brand Marketing Manager on Heathstone), but his road there is anything but a straight line — GameStop, a community college art show that changed his life, a run at a scrappy production shop making everything from AR birthday cards to Kevin Bacon narrating a phone app, a hard move to Florida that didn't work out, and eventually ZeniMax Online Studios, where he ended up quietly running three creative teams with no director in sight.

A few of the moments that stuck with me:

• How a community college teacher basically forced him into the meeting that started his entire career
• The four weeks it took at his first studio to go from "filling creative gaps" to accidental producer
• Treating his ADHD and hearing loss as tools instead of limitations
• The moment a new creative director looked at what he'd built and just said "it's yours"

Landon's one of the most genuinely empathetic people I've had on this show, and it comes through in every story he tells about the teams he's led.

I hope you enjoy this revisit and remember if you haven’t previously had the chance, you can catch the rest of the Season 01 content on Dev to Dev’s Patreon right here: https://www.patreon.com/DevToDevPodcast

• Spotify
• Patreon
• ⁠RSS⁠
• ⁠Instagram⁠
• ⁠Bluesky⁠
• ⁠YouTube⁠
• ⁠Blog⁠
• Email: DevToDevPodcast@Gmail.com

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/landonhood/