Hey, I watched it yesterday. It was fun watching and I’d like to be able to check out everything everyone created. I saw a spreadsheet in some of the videos, but haven’t found a link to any project/games.
Where can I find what everyone created? Or, is that available?
I’d also like to know what the hack week does to the norms of the company. I hope to intern and work at Roblox after college and the hack week is one of many things pulling me towards the company. I’d like more info overall and I can’t seem to find much on the jobs page, blog posts, Roblox website, ect.
Documenting hack week projects is a great idea, but I wish these had gone into greater technical detail and cut out some of the fluff. I honestly would’ve preferred an hour of someone just explaining how they developed a feature from start to finish.
The whole thing felt more like a company commercial than an engineering adventure and I really hope this wasn’t it. What happened to the ambitious projects like luaujit?
I think Manuel Bronstein put the whole thing well when he said
'Cause you’re gonna be showing this infront of judges that are gonna be seeing the end product. And this is not about ideas. This is about you build something that could actually work and seeing it palying out. (4:56)
It’s clear this wasn’t done for the same reason previous hack weeks were done, which is a shame because I really enjoyed seeing projects like the real-time texture-synthesizer, seamless teleports and windy foliage, even if they weren’t feasible to implement.
Now we got concerts, virtual pianos and teleporting friends together. Like what? We could already do that with lua.
This is good but we don’t really know much exactly about the winners of the hack week? We didn’t get to see any presentations, how people felt before/after presenting. The winners we only heard about their announcement not anything else. I’d liked to have learnt more. So it feels as if there was all this momentum and it’s just cut short, but it still was entertaining
My process started a few months before Hack Week. I opened a text document, titled it “HACK WEEK,” and anytime some random idea popped into my head I’d write it down so I wouldn’t forget it. Leading up to Hack Week I had five potential ideas to work on. I decided to work on Join Queue because I thought it would have a big impact and I realized that if I wasn’t trying to be too fancy with it, I could build a basic version in a week.
The week before Hack Week I spent some time thinking about how to design and build the feature. I put a design document together and shared it within my team for feedback. After a few discussions I felt confident that I had a good design that could be production-ready with a little extra work after Hack Week.
Here’s an example discussion topic: Originally, the queue was going to have a higher maximum size limit. For performance reasons, I was only going to update queue positions by looking at the front of the queue. This meant if someone stopped trying to join a game people behind them in line wouldn’t have their queue positions updated until that original person had gotten to the front of the line. We realized it would be better to do some extra processing to find and remove these abandoned join attempts throughout the entire queue, but limit the queue size as a result to address the performance concern.
Once Hack Week started it was mostly about implementing the design I had laid out. Of course, there were some edge cases I hadn’t considered that needed to be ironed out. Queued was a new state that needed to be added across several backend systems and I missed some spots in my first attempts. After a few days we were able to get the “happy path” working, recorded a demo, and got ready to present!
Seiing David Bazuki still actively working with the roblox team , makes me feel like he will never give up his game. Hopefully raytracing or better lighting artifacts will be added soon to roblox as they have been presented in 2018’s hackweek presentation.
