Engineering Blog

Why & How Words With Friends Is Adopting React Native
By John Bacon, Brian Liang, and Peter Turner on September 18, 2018
App and game developers who work on frequently updated products are often tasked with keeping up…

In 2018, we’ll be celebrating our 9 year anniversary since launching Words With Friends on mobile…

Parikshit Agnihotry and Leo Nishio Migrating primary data stores with no downtime, without losing data can be tricky and a lot could go wrong. One of the games at Zynga, recently completed such a project to migrate our primary data store to Couchbase from Membase, an older version of Couchbase server which is Memcached with…

Andrew Heidgerken Running a live social game can be a lot like playing a game of Jenga; the more moves you make the higher the chance the whole thing may crash down. Earlier this year, noting an increase in user complaints, we realized that the web game I work was threatening to collapse. Years ago,…

Sergey Skachkov and Ajinkya Apte (AWS Global Infrastructure) Purpose Zynga games have a wide global audience. Our main servers being in Oregon USA, the latency i.e. time for user devices to hit Zynga servers and back, especially for our global users is super high. Hence our aim was to reduce the latency for our end…

James Gregory Zynga recently released the web version of Duck Dynasty Slots , a game that started life as a mobile-only game. By leveraging Mozilla’s Emscripten project, we were able to port it to the web and deliver an experience just as compelling as the mobile version, all from one codebase for iOS, Android and…

Mary Sharp Managing a large infrastructure can be challenging — to say the least — and monitoring that infrastructure can be even tougher. At Zynga we have approached this problem by providing our teams with a central micro-system which allows them leverage Nagios and to use standards without having to even know them. Saigon allows…

Paul Bakaus Over the last few months, my team and I at Zynga have been working hard on a more granular, JS-based alternative to Jasy . Without further ado, meet the Instant Play plugin collection for Grunt: Grunt Dependency Resolver ( npm , github ) Grunt Cruncher ( npm , github ) Grunt Vendor Mutator…

Manik Taneja zBase is a distributed key-value store that is the storage backbone for almost all Zynga games.  It supports the memcached protocol on the front-end and is designed for persisting data to disk along with in-memory data replication for high availability.  zBase was forked from membase in early Jan 2012 and, since then, the…