AI writes the code faster; someone still has to read it
AI coding assistants make some engineering work measurably faster, but the saving arrives at the keyboard and the cost arrives in the review queue. Boards that book the first without planning for the second will buy defects with the headcount they think they have saved.
Software that other companies build their products on should change carefully where they can see it and be repaired relentlessly where they cannot.
Company revenue, 2025
C$402M
Engine subscriptions, revenue share on shipped titles and hosted online services
Engineers and specialists led
840
Across Vancouver, Montréal and Victoria, through seven direct reports
Sternhollow Online availability, 2025
99.96%
Up from 99.71 per cent in the first quarter of 2023
Studios build their games on our engine for five years at a stretch, so every change I make has to survive inside projects we will never see.
I am chief technology officer of Sternhollow Technologies Inc., a fictional Vancouver company that makes a real-time 3D engine, the editor tools that go with it and a hosted service that runs the online side of multiplayer games. About 3,100 studios pay for seats, from three-person teams in Halifax to publishers with a thousand developers. In 2025 we earned C$402 million, of which C$123 million came from Sternhollow Online, which carried 260 live games and a peak of 2.8 million concurrent players in December.
My path here ran through other people's deadlines. I started in 2001 writing visual-system code for airline flight simulators in Montréal, spent eight years programming renderers and engines at console studios in Québec City and Montréal, and then ran online engineering for a Swedish publisher's games from its Montréal hub. I joined Sternhollow in 2017 to build its online services and became CTO in March 2021. I now lead 840 engineers and specialists across Vancouver, Montréal and Victoria.
The fact that shapes my job is time. A studio that starts a game on our engine today expects to ship it in three to five years and to patch it for several more. Every dependency, licence, server and architectural change of ours lands inside those projects. I treat them as our real production environment, and I tell our board, in dollars and hours of downtime, what keeping faith with them costs.
A licence problem disclosed rather than buried
When our scanner found copyleft code compiled into a runtime that 412 shipped games carried, we told every customer within twelve days, bought a retroactive commercial licence for C$520,000 and replaced the code within eight weeks. Runtime dependencies have since fallen from 143 to 88, each with a named owner.
Availability rebuilt after a launch-weekend failure
After matchmaking failed for six hours and forty minutes during a customer's launch in March 2023, we stopped online feature work for six weeks. Sternhollow Online availability rose from 99.71 per cent in that quarter to 99.96 per cent across 2025, and pages per on-call shift fell from 5.8 to 1.6.
Cost per useful GPU-hour more than halved
We bought 128 GPU servers for the floor of our lighting-bake and asset-processing demand and kept renting the peaks. All-in cost per GPU-hour fell from C$3.10 to C$1.45, and GPU spending in 2025 was C$14.2 million against C$27 million projected had we kept renting every hour.
A new engine core without stranding studios
Instead of a clean break for version 6, we are moving the engine to a new object model one subsystem at a time behind a compatibility layer, with five years of support for version 5. Three of five subsystems have moved, and 38 per cent of active projects have opted in.
Current focus
I am preparing the board's decision on a second tranche of GPU servers, which turns on how much of our demand we trust to stay predictable for four years, and finishing the last two subsystems of the new engine core. I am also measuring what AI coding assistants have changed, a year after every engineer received them.
Conversations I welcome
I am not looking to leave Sternhollow. I would consider one independent directorship at a Canadian company whose revenue depends on software it runs for customers, outside games and with no relationship to Sternhollow, joining a risk or technology committee first. Twenty-four days a year is what I can offer, subject to my board's consent. I also accept a few invitations to speak to engineering leaders about reliability and supply-chain security.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
In the boardroom
Westerly Game Makers' SocietyDirector of a non-profit society supporting independent game developers in British Columbia · 2019–present
Formation
Bachelor of Engineering, computer engineeringUniversité de Montclerc · 1999
Master of Science, computer science (real-time graphics)Université de Montclerc · 2001
Nicholas talked me out of two decisions I wanted, the quiet licence fix and keeping the feature schedule after the launch outage, and both times he did it on paper with his own costs counted first. He is the only engineer I have worked with who raises the commercial objection to his own proposal before sales can.
Ewan KirkhavenFictional co-founder and chief executive, Sternhollow Technologies Inc.The full record ↗
Contact
I am not looking to leave Sternhollow. I would consider one independent directorship at a Canadian company whose revenue depends on software it runs for customers, outside games and with no relationship to Sternhollow, joining a risk or technology committee first. Twenty-four days a year is what I can offer, subject to my board's consent. I also accept a few invitations to speak to engineering leaders about reliability and supply-chain security.
