QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Jodi Moran, CTO at Plumbee, Senior Director of Technology at playfish.com

Jodi Moran

Biography: Jodi Moran

Jodi has worked in large-scale online entertainment for more than eight years, including senior positions at Sulake (makers of the virtual world Habbo), Betfair, NCSoft, Atari, and EA Playfish. During her two years leading Playfish technology, she grew the central engineering teams by a factor of eight, oversaw the successful launch of eight games, and created a social publishing platform that supports more than 10 million daily active and 100 million monthly active users. Jodi has recently co-founded Plumbee, a startup focusing on the social casino entertainment, which will launch its first title in early 2012. She holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Presentation: Zero to ten million daily users in four weeks: sustainable speed is king

Track: Highly-available systems / Time: Wednesday 15:20 - 16:20 / Location: Fleming

A successful social game can achieve very rapid growth to large scale during a short period of time, with extreme cases (CityVille, The Sims Social, Gardens of Time) achieving millions of daily active users and tens of millions of monthly active users within a few weeks of launch. In this presentation I will argue that achieving the fastest possible sustainable speed of development is the most important technical factor in launching and operating a successful social game, or indeed any large-scale web business -- whether at startup phase, during rapid growth, or established and mature. I will propose some techniques, both technical and non-technical, to optimize rapid development at large scale. Finally, I will describe some of the typical architecture, processes, and tools used in the development of both the transactional and analytical systems of social games.