Greetings, I am Lilith!

I am a game engineer based in Austin and I’m a little obsessed with Data Oriented Design.

My path to DOD enlightenment started in 2000 with a high school course on procedural C++. As OOP gripped the industry during my college years, I went along the standard OOP path and learned C#, XNA, and eventually Godot. Along the way, I decided I wanted to really learn the internals of game engine architecture. This led me to Odin and I started building my own game engine: Grimoria. I discovered a lot more than just architecture; it fundamentally upended everything I thought I knew about programming. It quite literally broke my brain. Now I’m on a mission to help others break out of the “comfy prison” of OOP and both simplify the programming experience and speed up a game’s performance. In an era where AAA games struggle to maintain 60 fps at 4k, going “back to the hardware” is the only way to deliver the experiences that gamers want.

What’s up with all the kitchen talk?

Before I was building engines, I spent about two decades working as a professional cook. If you step back and look at it, a high-volume kitchen is essentially a data pipeline. You have:

• Raw Ingredients (Input Data)
• The Line (The Processing Pipeline)
• Plated Service (The End-User Experience)

In a kitchen, bad memory management and a stream of cache misses look like a bogged down line, unhappy customers and lots and lots of waiting. Expect a plethora of cooking analogies here as I document building Grimoria and honing my craft as a first-class game engineer.

In Real Life

I’m a native 6th generation Texan from Fredericksburg, deep in the Texas Hill Country. I’m a trans woman who’s married to a teacher. We have a beautiful daughter, a gorgeous cat, and an adorable pupper. I love Goth music, Black Metal, Texas Country, horror movies, tabletop gaming, hiking, and playing complex RPG and simulation video games. I’m approaching middle age, but that has only given me more drive. I like building cool things, engineering lightning-fast systems, and maybe teaching some battle-tested kitchen knowledge along the way.