Java User Group

Meeting of the Hamburg Java User Group at Goodgame Studios

Despite the fantastic weather, this week saw around 50 eager developers come together for a meeting of the Hamburg Java User Group (JUGHH) in our café.

Events organized by the JUGHH are aimed at anyone interested in improving their skills and exchanging experience, experts and novices alike. It was fitting that the group should meet in the café at Goodgame Studios, as we rely primarily on Java for our game servers.
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Web Performance

Meetup for web performance experts at Goodgame Studios

The 18th Web Performance Meetup took place in our Goodgame café yesterday with 40 participants attending. The meetup is a platform to exchange experience, problems, tools, and recipes for success regarding performance of web-based and mobile applications, and takes place about ten times each year.

The evening kicked off with a few words about Goodgame Studios from our Chief Technical Officer Stefan Klemm. Then our Frontend Team Lead Lars gave a talk on “Traffic from over 200 countries – performance optimization in terms of global delivery”. A very important topic, especially here at GGS. Our websites are accessed all over the world, and it is a challenge to ensure that every visitor gets the same good user experience in terms of performance. Our Frontend Team has managed to achieve this, and Lars shared his knowledge with our guests in his presentation.
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Mental strength for our management staff

Personnel development is very important to us, and we regularly organize internal training events.

Training our management staff is especially important to our success, and to kick off a new series of talks, we recently welcomed Olaf Kortmann to Goodgame Studios. He shared tips with around 80 curious Goodgamers in his talk “Delivering top-quality results and staying mentally strong as a manager”. Many of our employees take on management roles early on in their careers, some for small teams and others for entire departments. Regardless of how much prior experience each person had, everyone took something useful away from the talk.
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Ilmenau

Goodgame Studios welcomes the Ilmenau University of Technology

We recently invited over 50 students from various faculties of the Ilmenau University of Technology to visit us at our offices and get to know Goodgame Studios as a potential employer. First of all the group was given a tour of our offices, the usability lab, and our green, open premises with our swimming pool. This gave them an idea of the great working conditions and technical facilities at our offices. Afterwards, our CTO Stefan gave a presentation introducing Goodgame Studios in more detail, followed by three employees who gave insights into their daily work. Thomas talked about the job of the marketing team, Katharina gave an overview of the conversion department, and Sören explained which skills are important as a project manager. Students about to finish their degrees are bound to have questions about entering professional life, and after the presentations our colleagues from the HR department were on hand to answer these and give tips about applications.
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Quo Vadis

European Games Award, Quo Vadis, and Good Drinks with Goodgame

On April 9th 2014, the results of the European Games Awards were announced in Berlin. We cleaned up on the evening, gathering three audience awards in one fell swoop. We received the European Games Award for Best Studio of 2014, while Goodgame Empire took home the prize for Best Browser Game. And Empire: Four Kingdoms enjoyed its first award ever, in the category of Best European Mobile Game. We would like to thank everyone who voted for us and our games and made this triple victory possible.
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Trashparty

Goodgame Studios celebrate in technicolor

In early April it was once again time for a party with 500 friends, also known as a Goodgame Studios company party. On a Friday evening, we gathered in the club Hühnerposten in Hamburg, intent on doing justice to the theme of GGSCASTCAHP (Goodgame Studios Celebrates A Super Trashy Colorful And Happy Party). Admittedly Mardi Gras had come and gone, but we nonetheless decided that bad taste was the way to go. The outfits on the night were true to the theme – even the buffet was in on the action with garish and outlandish dishes, while the decorations were so extravagantly colorful that they would not have been out of place at a child’s birthday party. All in all the scene was set for a fantastic party, and sure enough, the dance floor was packed by 9.30 and stayed that way well into the early hours. Even hits from Rednex and Whigfield failed to tone down the atmosphere – quite the opposite, in fact. A further highlight of the evening was the photo booth. It offered the opportunity for great snapshots of two or three people at a time. However, a quick glance through the photos shows us that up to six Goodgamers could (almost) comfortably squeeze in.
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