Building the backend for a cricket game.

My first job

I joined Nextwave Multimedia in Chennai in 2014, straight out of school, to work on the backend for World Cricket Championship.

The games eventually reached more than 100 million players. That’s their lifetime audience, including the years after I left Nextwave in 2016.

What I did

The server team was me.

I wrote the backend features and looked after them once they were live, learning to build and operate the software at the same time.

Mobile connections could drop in the middle of a game. Requests could fail or arrive more than once. I had to think about what those situations meant for a player’s session or transaction, then make sure I could tell what had happened.

Behind the game

My work covered:

• Real-time multiplayer sessions.
• Player transactions.
• Fraud and abuse detection.
• Game and player analytics.
• Tools for investigating problems after a release.

When something went wrong in production, I’d work backwards through the code to understand it. Reading source code was a big part of how I learned.

What I learned

A backend can look fine in development and behave quite differently when people are using it over unreliable connections.

I started spending more time thinking through failed requests, repeated transactions, and the information I’d need to investigate them.