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Building a Multiplayer New York Times Crossword by JP Robinson

At The New York Times, we’ve been using Go along with Google’s tools to rebuild the platform behind the crossword product. Recently we’ve been experimenting in adding realtime (and offline) collaborative crossword play and we’re ready to share some of the details of our implementation.

We’ll walk through building a realtime collaborative crossword game that uses App Engine, Firebase’s Realtime Database and other Google Cloud Platform tools for matchmaking, streaming game progress and aggregating game statistics.

JP Robinson is a Principal Software Engineer at The New York Times where he has been using and evangelizing Go for over 4 years. When he’s not walking around the office beating the drum to lead coworkers towards serenity with Gophers and Google Cloud, he can be found lounging with his fat cat, enjoying the amazing food of NYC or attempting (and failing) to get the high score on Joust at Barcade.

Music courtesy of Brett Buddin https://buddin.us (from modular audio synthesizers he's built in Go!) Thanks Brett!

Gopher characters are based on the Go mascot designed by Renée French and copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...). Thanks Renée!

The batgopher characters were created for us by Egon Elbre (http://egonelbre.com/). Thanks Egon!