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Adam Probert

I've never been very good at sticking to one thing.

Expert Generalist
Adam Probert

I’m Adam, an engineer in Cardiff. Ten years of data platforms, game backends and the infrastructure underneath, plus a long tail of projects nobody asked for. None of it was a plan. It was a series of successful stumbles, each one mostly figured out as I went.

This site is the record of that: what I built, and the specific thing it taught me. Often the mistake rather than the result.

The projectsOr say hello
Fig. 1

01Where I am now

Still building, just thinking bigger

I'm a Technical Director at Rocket Science, a games consultancy in Cardiff. I'm still hands-on with the engineering, but these days my job stretches well beyond the code.

I help us win the right work, build a culture people genuinely enjoy being part of, and help grow the studio in a way we can actually sustain.

The longer I do this, the more convinced I am that the hardest problems aren't technical. It's understanding what clients really need, knowing where to focus our efforts, and giving good people the space and support to do their best work.

I've always enjoyed being dropped into unfamiliar territory, figuring out what matters, and helping people find a way through. These days, that extends beyond individual projects to the wider studio. I'm still an engineer at heart, and I don't particularly want that to change. Being close to the technical work keeps me grounded, and I think it makes me better at the business side of things too.

Games is a great industry to be doing this in. The problems are unusual, the ideas are ambitious, and there's plenty of opportunity to bring in lessons from elsewhere. I'm enjoying having a hand in shaping not just what we build, but the studio we're building around it.

02Crème de la crème

Four of my favourite projects

Software, side projects, and the occasional successful stumble

  • Sheet 12 of 25

    Game server observability for Amazon GameLift Servers

    2024 · Platform

    Telemetry SDKs and dashboards for Amazon GameLift Servers.

    Moving timings to histograms and percentiles showed bad frames that the averages had hidden. We had to be just as careful with the collector's own timings, including the occasional slow tick. There was a lot to agree across the three SDKs too. A metric with the same name needs the same units and behaviour in each language, or a studio looking at the shared dashboard can end up comparing different things.

  • Sheet 3 of 25

    Cheddar

    2025-26 · Robotics

    A 3D-printed rover with six driven, independently steered wheels.

    I shelved this for the best part of a year over a serial connection. I was set on using the Pi's GPIO pins to talk to the ESP32. It worked perfectly in isolation, Pi to ESP32 to drivers to motors and servos, then fell apart every time I put it all together. When I came back to it I tried a USB cable instead. It worked immediately. I'd spent weeks trying to get the GPIO version working and hadn't even tried USB.

  • Sheet 4 of 25

    The Grimoire ML mark: a burning spellbook with ML in the flames.

    Grimoire ML

    2025 · AI / Web

    Describe the Magic card you're after and turn that into a Scryfall search.

    Having the model write search syntax directly made a bad result difficult to work out. Had it misunderstood the request, or was the query wrong? Putting a structured representation in the middle let me look at those separately. I could also test the whole query layer without making a model call. I put that in late, I'd start there if I built it again.

  • Sheet 2 of 25

    Scrapkings - Mascott

    ScrapKings

    2026 · Game

    Bolt increasingly ridiculous parts onto a car and see how far it gets.

    This one's paused. The scope got ahead of me and the summer of 2026 was a glorious one. I did write the design pillars down early though, which helped when the ideas started piling up. Driving has to be fun before you get any upgrades. Parts should give you a new move. You also need to be able to tell what's happening when the screen gets busy. If an idea didn't fit those, I could leave it out before spending time building it.

All projects →
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If you’re stuck on something or thinking about starting a project, I’m happy to chat it through.

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