Pokémon GO with Edward Wu, Director of Software Engineering at Niantic

We’re back! And we’re bringing a seriously cool interview about Pokémon GO with Edward Wu, Director of Software Engineering at Niantic.

In this interview your co-hosts Francesc and Mark chat with Ed about the whole history of Pokémon GO, from the inception of Niantic to the amazing success and the scaling challenges they faced.

About Ed

Ed Wu is a Director, Software Engineering at Niantic who leads the engineering team of Pokémon GO as well as the Niantic Seattle site. Before helping to lead Niantic from its successful spin-out from Google, Dr. Wu was a Staff Software Engineer at Google where he developed machine learning models in ads quality.

He received his PhD from Stanford in Physics in 2009 applying Bayesian parameter estimation models to cosmological data he collected from three visits to Antarctica and the South Pole.

Cool thing of the week

• How we secure our infrastructure: a white paper blog post
• Google Infrastructure Security Design Overview docs
• Google Cloud Platform icons and sample architectural diagrams, for your designing pleasure blog post
• Solution Icons for Architectural Diagrams link
• Continuous Deployment to Google Cloud Platform with Drone NYTimes
• You can read all the source code in:
  • Drone
  • Drone GKE
  • Drone GAE

Interview

• Pokémon GO homepage
• Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud blog post
• Leveraging the Google Cloud Platform niantic
• Ingress homepage
• Introducing Google Customer Reliability Engineering blog post
• ‘Pokémon GO’ Is About To Surpass Twitter In Daily Active Users On Android Forbes

Pokémon GO logo owned by The Pokémon Company (from Wikipedia)

Pokémon GO stack:

• Java on Container Engine docs
• Cloud Datastore docs
• Cloud Bigtable docs
• (and more)

Question of the week

I have these keys that I want to use for encrypting my data at rest.

• Managing encryption keys in the cloud: introducing Google Cloud Key Management Service blog post
• Google Cloud Key Management docs

Different solutions for different security needs