How Dots Uses AWS Data Pipeline to Punch Above Its Weight

Before data scientist Jae Young Lee joined Dots in 2017, the mobile game studio only employed one other data scientist who was responsible for manually running all of the company’s Python scripts and SQL queries. While it wasn’t back-breaking work, it did require the data scientist to constantly monitor his computer so that it never went to sleep and was on WiFi the whole time, even on the weekends. It’s an annoyance familiar to anyone who’s spent hours waiting to transfer a big file.

Lee took it upon himself to help his colleague and decided to automate everything with AWS Data Pipeline. “If we were running everything that Pipeline runs manually, it would basically just take up our whole day and we wouldn’t be able to work on these…longer-term initiatives of trying to add some machine learning into our games,” he says. “Because AWS provides this reliable solution, we’re able to just kind of focus on other things more.”

Some examples of the data Lee and his colleague are crunching for Dots includes how much the company spent on ads during a specific period, how much revenue the company made in a certain time frame, and if they are hitting their KPIs. Without scripts crunching all the data every day, Lee says, “we don’t have a sense of just how our game is doing on a day-to-day basis, which is huge when we’re releasing new features and stuff.”