A Day in the Life of the ROBLOX Web Team

By Andrew Haak - April 23, 2013

ROBLOX is about 70 people strong, with teams specializing in everything from web and client development to customer service and marketing. While each team executes starkly contrasting projects, we’re united by our shared values and the ultimate goal of making ROBLOX the best digital-creation experience. We’re going behind the scenes with teams across ROBLOX to provide some insight into the tasks and challenges associated with achieving that goal, starting with the Web Team.

You can think about a day in the life of a ROBLOX web developer as having three distinct areas of focus: planning, developing and releasing. Depending on the day, one might weigh heavier than another.

Automated Web Testing: Where Quality and Efficiency Meet

By Andrew Haak - February 27, 2013

In this article, web engineers Antoni Choudhuri and Brandon Chothia discuss ROBLOX’s commitment to quality via automated web testing, and what the future holds for our testing infrastructure.

ROBLOX is a growing company – just look at our Jobs page to see the variety of positions we’re looking to fill – and our expansion is enabling us to develop and release features faster than ever before. While we’re producing a greater quantity of features, we’re just as importantly placing a greater emphasis on the quality of everything we do. One of the ways that has manifested itself is the expansion and improvement of our testing infrastructure for Roblox.com.

Speeding ROBLOX.com with Message Queuing

By Gigi Sayfan - June 19, 2012

In an April blog post, Supporting Millions of Players at ROBLOX, we mapped out ROBLOX’s back-end web technology. Today, Gigi Sayfan discusses message queuing, a single component nestled in our greater web infrastructure, and how it helps us accelerate updates to our huge catalog and the user-account search function. He also offers practical advice on setting up a message queuing application for a specific set of goals.

In a common, distributed web application architecture, multiple web servers talk directly to a database and/or to back-end services that relay messages to the database. ROBLOX has millions of users, who constantly bombard our many web servers with requests that eventually funnel into the database. If the database is busy, it will be slow to respond to requests – both from the web servers and back-end services – and the user experience will suffer. Worst case scenario, requests time out.

To avoid slow responses and time-outs, ROBLOX has implemented a message queue, which currently manages roughly 15 million requests a day.