Agenda
1 Across: Moving NYT's Legacy Crossword (Without Breaking 7 Down)
Sam Margolius (Producer, The New York Times Company (Games))
Malcolm Jones (Senior Software Engineer, The New York Times Company (Games))
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Hot Topics:
Mobile
Track:
Production & Team Leadership
Audience Level:
Advanced
Format:
Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: Advanced
Re-platforming the New York Times Crossword—the origin story of NYT Games—presents a unique challenge: modernizing a legacy system supporting billions of plays across iOS, Android, and web without a single original engineer on the team. This session explores how a cross-functional strike team executes a seamless multi-platform migration on a live, revenue-critical product without disrupting daily active users.
Speakers share the operational strategies, platform analysis, and real-world data behind this digital archaeology effort—achieving a massive reduction in the overall data footprint alongside a 15% drop in annual infrastructure costs. Attendees walk away with actionable frameworks for auditing undocumented code, unifying multi-platform architecture to reduce technical debt, and aligning product, engineering, and production teams to modernize legacy games for future growth.
(PR Note: Pending final internal New York Times PR approval prior to public release.)
Speakers share the operational strategies, platform analysis, and real-world data behind this digital archaeology effort—achieving a massive reduction in the overall data footprint alongside a 15% drop in annual infrastructure costs. Attendees walk away with actionable frameworks for auditing undocumented code, unifying multi-platform architecture to reduce technical debt, and aligning product, engineering, and production teams to modernize legacy games for future growth.
(PR Note: Pending final internal New York Times PR approval prior to public release.)
Takeaway
Attendees gain actionable strategies for multi-platform legacy migrations, including frameworks to audit undocumented codebase edge cases, cloud migration techniques that achieve a massive data footprint reduction, and cross-functional alignment protocols that preserve daily active user retention during major infrastructure overhauls.
(PR Note: Pending final NYT PR approval prior to publication.)
(PR Note: Pending final NYT PR approval prior to publication.)
Intended Audience
This session targets mid-to-senior engineers, platform architects, producers, product leaders, executive tech leaders navigating legacy architecture and those who want to future proof their nascent projects. Attendees benefit from actionable frameworks for multi-platform migrations and cross-functional alignment. Intermediate knowledge of game platform infrastructure and software product development is recommended.
(PR Note: Pending final NYT PR approval prior to publication.)
(PR Note: Pending final NYT PR approval prior to publication.)