What sparked your interest for coding and how did you learn it?

I was working in a startup many years ago where I was surrounded by software engineers. Though I had taken some casual programming classes in high school I wasn’t really inspired to go into programming until I saw how empowering the career track was with my colleagues. Because I left home when I was 17 I was working my way through college, and much of my actual coding was self taught or learned on the job

Any tips on game marketing and making it successful?
I'm part of a team but we aren't really generating any revenue, even with ~500 concurrent players on all of our games combined. (about 3)

We have some great articles published on both our DevHub from fellow Roblox employees as well as from our top community members https://developer.roblox.com/ on monetization and retention. It’s a great place to start to learn some strategies and techniques to increase your revenue. From a marketing perspective many of our successful devs leverage advertising options on Roblox https://developer.roblox.com/articles/Advertising. You can also apply to be featured on the Roblox platform: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/official-featured-sort-game-nomination-survey/61535

Grace/Andrew, did you ever imagine seeing Roblox as a viable career for developers (To the point of where it becomes their full-time jobs/career focus)? I also work full-time on Roblox, and people still don't believe that (Young individuals, such as us) can make video games for a living (I've had people straight up tell me to "Get a real job" and that "Video games are for kids").

I have always been so impressed by the caliber of talent we have on the Roblox platform. Our creators are not only making successful games which rake in real money - many of them are also going to school at the same time. The money they earn in many cases is equivalent to a solid living wage.

What got you into roblox and did you see yourself in this position when you first started?

I was actually recruited into Roblox and while I wasn’t familiar at the time with Roblox I was super excited to find out more about it during my interview process. One of the things that intrigued me the most was the young, emerging developer audience that was core to the success of Roblox. I loved the idea of such an engaging platform and having the opportunity to build and lead a team to create programs for this audience. I saw this as a great way to tie my passions around building developer communities, education, and diversity programs.

For Grace: What was the highlight of your Roblox work career? Is there a time where you felt most excited or passionate about Roblox's vision and mission?

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For Andrew: What phase of development do you find the best, (eg. Brainstorming the main idea, creating the storyline, figuring out how everything will fit together, actually coding and building the game, releasing, advertising, etc)

Boy that’s a tough one - there have been so many highlights in my time here. We’ve had such tremendous growth in the community, and have made progress across our existing programs to accelerate developer success including our Incubator and Accelerator programs, alongside kicking off significantly new initiatives in Education, Internationalization, as well as developer community and documentation. For me, being able to highlight many of these accomplishments at RDC this past summer was an awesome experience. My favorite part was picking my walk on song - “The Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin. :-)

My son prefers Roblox to Minecraft, and he plays one with all these different kinds of axes. He loves it and is always talking about wanting to make his own Roblox game, but I'm ignorant of where to start. What are some resources I should investigate to help a 12 y/o with enthusiasm and gumption, but no experience, learn how to do what he wants to do?

We’ve got a wealth of resources to get your son started. First many of our developers start by downloading Roblox Studio - our free development tool for PC and Mac. There are community-endorsed models, which have code that many devs have used as a starting point to break down how things work. For more formal learning, however, we also have tutorials available on our developer hub: https://developer.roblox.com/learn-roblox/all-tutorials, as well as a fun creator challenge which Jurassic World cosponsored with us: https://developer.roblox.com/resources/creator-challenge/Main-Page. Finally, we have 84+ educational partners across 22 countries who have after school or summer programs to help students learn how to develop on Roblox: https://developer.roblox.com/resources/educators/educatorList .

For Grace, have you worked at other companies or organizations you could compare to Roblox before? Also, do you have any (work or personal) experience prior to working at Roblox that help you personally achieve your goals for the company?

I’ve had a very non-traditional path in my career. I left home when I was 17 - having accelerated my high school education in 3.5 years. I worked my way through college off and on for ten years. In that time I managed to land a variety of technical roles and eventually software development - most of which was self taught. After several years as a developer, I decided to try out other career tracks and was able to parlay my technical skills in product management and technical marketing. In 2004 I went to Microsoft to take on a role as a technical evangelist for their first enterprise developer suite of tools. Since then I’ve continued to grow my career in developer relations in other organizations such as Intuit and Atlassian, and now Roblox - across a variety of solutions from commercial to open source, enterprise, small business, finetch, and consumer. Developer relations is a relatively new discipline so every developer community, program, and initiative has brought along its own unique set of challenges and learnings. That wealth of experience has been invaluable in my time here at Roblox- however as with previous experiences we have our own unique set of challenges here which keeps developer relations an exciting place to be for me.