Ruby vs. PHP — which one wins?
I’ve tried a lot of programming languages. I started my programming journey in university — more than 8 years ago — playing with C and C++. Later, I added Java. In the end, in what I thought it was the final change, I switched to scripting languages... »
How to Aggregate Percentiles - Tdigest to the rescue
One of the most important sub-metrics of our Quality of Experience metric is buffering time. Nobody wants to see the infamous loading circle icon! Here at Showmax, we invest a lot of time and effort helping our customers avoid it. We created several... »
Get to know the data driven design process at Showmax
“We live to get everyone watching” — this is one of the claims that we have here at Showmax to align on what we aim for. Another claim speaks to how we achieve it: “We make it easy, relevant and awesome”. The design of our streaming application is... »
State of the DevOps ecosystem
An Interview with Angus Dippenaar
Recently, we discussed our move to Monitoring with a modern tech stack that revolved around our switch to Prometheus and AlertManager. Since early 2020, we have continuously made changes to both monitoring and alert management systems. In this interview... »
Delivering content the right way, Part II.
Less painful content reshuffling
Here at Showmax, it’s not all about using third party CDNs. We have our own servers for serving content as well, so the constant question is: “How do we balance all the traffic?” In the past, we used a solution with modulo. To use modulo, we converted... »
Developers' basic guide to kubernetes
As Showmax, we are slowly moving toward future in the clouds. Among many changes we are introducing related to migration to AWS (which will be topic of many articles to come, do not worry), we also decided to leave behind our workload orchestrator... »