Hello, world! What a long, strange trip it’s been. Some things have held constant since the beginning of Riot engineering: we still hold the player experience above all else, we still focus on constantly improving ourselves and our technology, and we still love to play games. But other things have dramatically changed for our team: we no longer fit in 500 square-feet, we now serve players all over the world, and supporting 1,000 concurrent players is no longer our biggest challenge. At the beginning of this journey, we couldn’t have imagined the challenges that’d arise from the scale we face today, and that influence everything from the technology we create to how we shape a player-focused engineering team.

I’m excited to introduce Riot’s new tech blog where we’ll discuss engineering topics along the breadth of these challenges. League of Legends players have given us the awesome opportunity to tackle these problems, and we’ve learned a ton that we’d like to discuss. Our goal is to share with you, the engineering community, our journey developing technology while we learn from your questions and comments.

What you won’t find here is a discussion of technology for technology’s sake. Rather, what’s important is how and why we wield technology to ship value to players. In fact, Riot isn’t a technology company, which might sound odd in the context of announcing a tech blog: Riot’s a product company. We believe the only path to success is a focus on players, which means a focus on products.

A focus on products is why we’re not only building League of Legends, but also new games, esports experiences, a merchandise store, creative ventures, big data pipelines, and more. Our engineers create the technology for those products to succeed in delighting players. As players ourselves, we know the joy of truly great game experiences, and we’re dedicated to creating new ones.

We plan to discuss facets of our engineering challenges that we hope will resonate with the community. To release content at will, our teams must move quickly and own their work end-to-end; to support that need we're developing private cloud infrastructure and working to evolve our continuous delivery platform. With our desire to make data-informed decisions, we've invested in our Insights Tech team and their work building out our global data pipeline to analyze petabytes of game data. In our quest to continually improve the LoL player experience, we've implemented machine-learning algorithms to better understand how players interact with our game, both positively and negatively. To maintain the highest level of availability of Riot's game and web properties, we've placed them atop tech stacks comprised of both our own work and invaluable open-source technologies we couldn't live without. And, in the constant battle to stay ahead of malicious attacks, we're supporting our security team and their efforts running a bug bounty program, developing security tools, reviewing Riot code, and educating Riot engineers on cutting-edge trends and best practices.