“What to watch recommendation” and our Film2vec model
To deliver the best content to the right users we utilize asset metadata - movie or series features like genre, length, stars, etc. - but that has some limitations to it. The set of possible tags for assets is always finite, and adding extra data manually... »
Assumption Testing: Don’t Throw Darts in The Dark
When software products fail, they do so because they fail to deliver the intended impact. One problem is that teams don’t tackle risks upfront. Will users choose to use the feature? Will users know how to use the feature? Will the feature deliver the... »
Delivering content the right way, Part III.
Serving content from multiple CDNs
It’s a challenge to provide a top tier video streaming service across Africa. Quality internet networks are few and far between, server locations are often not ideal (we need to connect very distant countries), peering points are limited, and every... »
Remote testing on Smart TVs
Recently, we joined the Frontendisti community at their November Prague meetup. Tomáš Zeman, Showmax Frontend team leader of the web and smart TV team, delivered a talk about how we tackle remote testing on smart TVs. This blog post summarizes the... »
The journey from PHP to Ruby
I got acquainted with PHP and started my developer’s career in 2013, when I was a 3rd-year university student. I received an offer to work as technical support engineer in a company that had a self-written framework in PHP. Three month later, I moved... »
By Showmaxers, for Showmaxers: PostgreSQL Terminology
Here at Showmax, we enjoy the luxury of being surrounded by highly-experienced colleagues. Somebody somewhere at Showmax can both understand and work with the thing that no one else can — all the time. Maybe it sounds a bit like bragging, but the truth... »