Notes and Noises - writing and music by David Donoghue, a Dublin based creative, Full Stack Web Engineer and Technical Director.
(Includes illustrations by Midjourney… I am no illustrator!)
All thoughts, views and creative work expressed in this publication are my own and are not those of my employer or any other organisation which I may be affiliated with.
What can I expect?
I will mostly publish creative writing - often poetry or prose which may also be accompanied by some photography and/or audio designed to compliment.
I might publish music - a mix of ambient, techno, experimental and instrumental recordings if and when I create them and feel they are worth publishing.
I may publish observations and articles - driven by my growing knowledge of and interest in the tech industry and the Arts culture around me in Dublin and Ireland.
A bit more detail
My Writing
I have until recently been publishing my writing through intheblackbox.com. Starting in 2005, this was where I started to write creatively, finding my way through trial and error and capturing what I could in an unfiltered and automatic flow.
They duck in from their perch. Below the whips and lashes. One tiny step by step into the unforgiving wall of wind. The Earth aches and bellows. Pushing forward with its groans against the growth that has sprung upon it.
In The Black Box - Eyes to the Wind
Aside from my more personal writing, I have also founded, created and contributed to arthub.ie, an Irish based arts website that covered arts exhibitions, performances and publications over a period of 3 years from 2011-2013. The site is now archived but it is still available to be enjoyed and features the writing of 5 excellent Irish arts writers and enthusiasts.
My Music
I have previosly also been producing and recording music as In the Black Box for over 15 years. Like my writing this has been a process of discovery as I created sounds that range from simple acoustic guitar recordings, to experimental techno, funk techno (!?) and field recordings of street musicians in Madrid.
You can listen to all In the Black Box releases on Bandcamp and a more random selection on Soundcloud to get a better sense of my sound and what to expect.
Before this I also cut my teeth on musical performance through the often followed teenage ritual of a school and university rock band. This taught me a lot about what it takes to be successful as a musician and true to this reality the dream faded as we grew older, but I will always cherish those days performing during our own modest version of a music career in venues across Dublin.
I have continued to create music in my spare time as a personal desire to practice and a form of therapy - for me it is as much an investigation into the technologies and instruments that I have to hand as it is an attempt to find some level of inner joy and calm.
My Career
For more detail just pop over to my LinkedIn.
Over the past decade (and more), I have in turn been a Designer, Engineer, Team Leader, Technical Manager, Product Manager and now Technical Director for a highly successful games company, DIGIT Game Studios. At heart I am a critical thinker and a designer with a laser focus on process optimisation - I graduated with a degree in Art History and French and followed that up with a Masters in Interative Digital Media. Within a fantastic engineering culture and an amazing team around me at DIGIT, I found my niche designing, building and deploying the tooling that exposed the power of our live services platform to our internal teams - ultimately resulting in a Live Operations system that drives massive engagement and revenue in our game on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. I am now directing an entire cluster dedicated to the development and maintenance of all internal tooling for our games, from Live Operations to Customer Support, Game Design to Art, Engineering to QA.
Stepping back, I am often surprised I have ended up here - I am not sure I ever planned this. In truth, until recently I have mostly interpretted this career as a necessity - a job which I “picked up” with the engineering skills I had attained as a convenient by-product of my desire to promote my writing, music and photography online… It seems, despite my indifference, I have grown into a successful, well rounded tech focussed leader and have played a significant part in helping bring a small startup company from humble beginnings to a multi-million dollar sale 7 years later. That was then followed by the enormous growth (in part due to the massive success of our game Star Trek Fleet Command) and subsequent multi-billion dollar sale of our parent company, Scopely.
With all of this behind me (and much more ahead I hope) I have increasingly found myself to be more informed and engaged on the challenges of the tech and games industry and my role in this field - particularly in the context of the monumental changes that are now impacting our day to day work, be that the challenges of remote working following covid or the dawn of AI.
Why subscribe?
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