"Niantic CTO Phil Keslin interview at Strata+Hadoop March 15"

#PokemonGO: Niantic CTO Phil Keslin sat down for a 30 min interview about lessons learned from the launch of Pokémon Go during the opening keynote at Strata+Hadoop. Nothing earth shattering but a few highlights:Originally estimated size of audience for game by taking numbers from other large MMOs and multiplying by 10 then multiplying again by another 5 to bound worst case scenario5-6 hours into NZ/Aus launch they were already 2.5x ahead of expectations when that should have been 4% of total capacity.Core server development/engineering was done by 4 engineers; 3 from a Google, 1 who was hired since he was a Pokémon fan.Pokémon Go is built in a different platform than Ingress; Pokémon Go platform will be one used for their future gamesDuring discussion of database sharding and replication referenced today it isn't possible in Pokémon Go to create links between players or objects across long distances (e.g. 3000 km) but in the future they will be able to like they do in Ingress (followed by him making a cringe like, did I just say that face)A lesson learned from launch was to be careful relying on third party software/libraries. For example, during first few weeks game would always crash at 2:30 east because there was a component they were using which had undocumented issues scaling in a distributed computing environment. Once they identified the issue and replaced with standard Java library, crashes stopped. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2nFYDGW