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Comment by alasdair_ | Hacker News Reader

Pokemon GO.

It was such a surreal moment to finally leave the office after months of crunch time, walk out into the sunshine for lunch for the first time and see almost every person on the street playing the game.

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You personally made Pokemon GO?

Bits of it. I wrote the code to figure out where on the planet all the pokestops and gyms should go, for example[1]. But there were five other backend engineers by the time we launched, plus a bunch of front end people, artists, etc.

[1] To be extra-clear, all code in the game was touched by more than one person, every one of them better engineers than I am.

Your experience needs to be documented for history. Seriously. The people, personalities, the development setups, the day to day creation - all that is of keen interest to millions.

I'll write it up.

If you do, let use know at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.

Will do! Thanks.

The OpenStreetMap community would be absolutely fascinated to learn what you were doing with OSM data, without a doubt.

I have so much to say here, especially when it comes to OSM vs Google Maps (given that the whole project was originally an offshoot of Google's Geo division) but I also have an NDA that I need to go read carefully. It's definitely not my intent to accidentally break confidentiality.

I do want to say how amazing OSM was. There are SO MANY weird laws in different countries and OSM was a fantastic source of data in many of them. One example is South Korea - there were laws from decades ago that made it very difficult legally to have detailed maps of many parts of south korea - the OSM maps there were far superior to anything else available.

Being an extensive ingress player, i'm quite surprised at this considering this should have been ingress code to begin with. Did pogo not share much code with ingress, just the dataset?

There was very little code shared on the backend. Ingress was appengine talking to custom clients via JSON, PGO was GCE/GKE talking to Unity clients via protobufs. Almost everything on the backend was written specifically for PGO because the Ingress codebase just couldn't scale, at least not cost-efficiently, to the number of users.

Also, Ingress is all about controlling areas of the map, while PGO was mostly based on points of interest, so the architecture needed to be quite different. I'll go into more detail when I post the writeup.

That's interesting! My friends who were avid Ingress players totally repeated the story that at least the geospatial data was somehow reused directly (to generate points of interest automatically based on places that figured into Ingress gameplay). It would be interesting to hear to what extent that was a misconception.

The POI is indeed reused from Ingress. For a very long time the only way to get a new POI in Pokémon GO is to make a new portal in Ingress and it will sync over.

There are quite a few sources of data but yes, the ingress POI data was used as one source.

Very cool! Feels like many organisations now have dozens of teams all working on parts of a badly made CRUD app but you guys wrote something people actually want to use that is scaled well enough for people all over the world to play.

That seems a million miles away from everyday agile and crud stuff...

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