Joel Petersen
Distinguished Software Engineer at Zynga
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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SeniorJoel Petersen is a distinguished software engineer with 14 years of experience building high-profile games and tooling across consoles, mobile and PC, currently leading core engineering at Zynga from San Francisco. He is fluent in C/C++, Objective-C, C#, and Go, with deep expertise in gameplay systems, online play, and graphics primitives—contributions include stability and graphics fixes to the widely used Cocos2d projects. His console pedigree spans major EA titles on PS2/PS3 and Xbox platforms, and he has led iOS and cross-platform teams on live multiplayer titles like Words With Friends and Star Wars Hunters. Joel combines low-level systems thinking (serialization, memory/display optimizations) with gameplay design sensibilities, making him effective at both shipping polished player experiences and hardening developer tools.
14 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (8)
memory-management10
objective-c10
ios10
coco10
cocos2d-x10
graphics-programming10
opengl9
debugging9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
cocos2d/CocosBuilder
Mar 2012 - Mar 2012
CocosBuilder, the visual editor for cocos2d
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer
Mobile DeveloperContributions:8 commits in 3 days
Contributions summary:Joel primarily focused on fixing compilation issues and addressing crashes within the CocosBuilder project, a visual editor for cocos2d. Their contributions involved modifying code related to object serialization and deserialization, and fixing a crash related to dereferencing a float pointer, specifically impacting the application's functionality on iOS devices. The user's work directly improved the stability and reliability of the CocosBuilder tool, by addressing issues in file loading.
cocos2d-xvisual-editor
cocos2d/cocos2d-objc
Mar 2012 - Mar 2012
Cocos2d for iOS and OS X, built using Objective-C
Role in this project:Mobile Developer (iOS)
Mobile Developer (iOS)Contributions:7 commits in 17 days
Contributions summary:Joel primarily contributed to the Cocos2d-objc repository by adding, modifying, and refactoring drawing primitives and related functionalities. They added a ccDrawTriangleStrip function, updated existing line drawing features, and modified OpenGL shader usage within the drawing primitives. In addition to these graphics-related changes, the user added a memory display feature and made adjustments to the CCAnimationCache and CCDirector to improve resource management.
cocos2d-xiosobjective-c
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