Eva Podbrdská in the winning team at the Showmax offsite

Frequently on Slack, we sometimes get to hear fun stories she tells us about her dog, but more often we benefit from her devotion to her job and correct those mistakes of ours which she politely points out. She is an absolute professional and founder of the Showmax testers community, where members can share knowledge over a cup of coffee. Meet Eva Podbrdská, celebrating 4 years at Showmax this year. 

People tend to simplify things so we could say Eva is a tester, but she would explain to you that there is much more to it than just testing the software, so read on…

You have been working for Showmax for almost 4 years now, solely focused on testing. What thrills you about testing and why is it the best job for you personally?

I love when I get to do investigative work. The thrill of tracking down errors, searching for clues, digging in logs, gathering tiny bits of information until the culprit emerges – it's like a treasure hunt. Other people pay for this experience – and I'm lucky enough to get paid for it!

Another thing that intrigues me about the QA field is how diverse and varied the job is and how much there is to learn. I get to work within all layers of the tech stack, so I have the opportunity to play with many different tools and technologies. I get to cooperate with a very diverse group of people from a variety of teams. I get to do all kinds of things – sometimes my job is just figuring out who needs to talk to whom in order to make things work, and then facilitating that meeting :-) So I wouldn't exactly say I'm “solely focused on testing.” I'm focused on software quality and testing is just a part of that. 

How did you become a tester? Was it a coincidence or a well-thought-through choice?

It was a very pragmatic choice originally. Just like many other new moms, when my parental leave was nearing its end, I knew I didn't want to go back to my previous job in telecommunications where I'd had to work twelve-hour shifts, day and night. I needed a more flexible working arrangement to be able to combine work with caring for our kid. And I knew that jobs in IT tend to have this flexibility. At first, I was thinking of becoming a programmer - but I quickly realised it would take me more than a few weeks to learn coding on a level that would get me a job. Fortunately I found out that there is such a thing as testing, which I'd never heard of before. That sounded like something I could do! I was incredibly lucky to land a part-time job at Showmax almost straight away. And I quickly fell in love with my work. I think I've finally figured out what I want to do when I grow up! :-) 

Have you ever had a mentor at Showmax helping you grow the tester's skill set? 

I haven't had a dedicated mentor at Showmax but I have learned a lot from everybody I've cooperated with, regardless of their role. Showmax is an amazing place that has enabled me to learn and grow on a scale I'd never expected to be possible. In a sense, the whole company is my mentor! And being a backend tester, I am often acting as a hub connecting many different people and teams across the company. I get to work with developers, product owners, project managers, data engineers, and also with people from other companies we cooperate with. So many opportunities to learn new things every day!
Another community that has supported me a lot in my learning is the Ministry of Testing. It's without exaggeration the best testing community in the observable universe and I feel very fortunate to be a part of it and learn from my fellow testers all around the world.

How many testers do you cooperate with on a daily basis?

Being the only tester on our team, I don't cooperate with other testers at Showmax very often. To be honest, that's something that's been bugging me for quite some time – that testers from different teams don't get to learn from each other all that much. I have recently started running regular “coffee” sessions where we share knowledge together. We'll see how it goes.

What does your typical day look like? (Is there a week day you like the most, e.g. because of regular testing loads?)

In the backend we don't have scheduled releases, we release on a continuous basis. That means there are no typical days for me – every day is different. Scheduled meetings, ad-hoc meetings, pairing, deep solo work or just jumping here and there on Slack to help people out… I never know what the day will bring.

So no favourite day because of its schedule? 
I enjoy Thursdays – I've recently gone back to working part-time, I'm working only four days a week and have Fridays off. So Thursday is my Friday before a three-day weekend :-D I can't recommend this arrangement enough, it has been doing wonders for my mental health. It's absolutely worth the pay cut for me.

In December last year, you finished Femme Palette mentoring and Black-Box Software Testing (BBST) Foundations course levelling up your skills. What would you say the Femme Palette mentor helped you with the most?

My mentor was Lewis Prescott and I couldn't have wished for a better one. Not only is Lewis extremely experienced as a tester and test lead, he's also one of the kindest and most supportive people I've ever met. It's priceless to be able to talk things through with somebody who has gone through the exact same challenges and knows how to deal with them.

The main topic we've been discussing was implementing change. It's one thing to identify issues and inefficiencies in the current ways we work as a team and know what we want to change, but actually making the change happen is a whole new animal. People are naturally resistant to change – the force of habit is a very powerful one. Lewis has helped me a lot with figuring out how to split a change into tiny steps and then find out ways to achieve each of those steps. Every now and then I find myself referring back to my notes from our sessions. 
And I haven't only gained a mentor, I've gained a friend.

And what has the BBST course brought you? 

Oh, lots of things :-) It was a very intense course that took basically all of my free time during a period of four weeks and covered a lot of topics – for example, there was a module on computer science fundamentals, another one on test strategy… But my main takeaway from this course was probably how it changed my mindset about testing oracles. A testing oracle is something that gives you a definite answer to the question “is this a feature, or a bug?” Previously, if I didn't have a clear and unambiguous oracle, I would always be looking for somebody to make that decision for me. The BBST course has empowered me to make the call myself and given me tools to support it – not only to say “I think this is a bug,” but also to give a powerful argument for “why is it a bug?” I'm very much looking forward to the next course, BBST Test Design, which I'll be taking in April. 

Last year you also visited the TestBash conference in the UK. This year you are coming back as a speaker. What will your talk be about?

TestBash UK (run by the Ministry of Testing) was absolutely incredible and I can't thank Showmax enough for funding our trip. The format of this conference is pretty unique – each speaker gives not only a talk, but also facilitates a hands-on workshop and an “activity” (a short, bite-sized workshop) which together make for a very intense and enjoyable learning experience.

I was very surprised when my abstract for this year's TestBash UK was accepted. I have never spoken at an in-person conference before so this is a whole new challenge for me – I'm equally exhilarated and terrified :-) The workshops will be especially demanding for me, as I don't have much experience with interactive teaching. Fortunately the MoT team is very supportive and I know I can ask them for help when I need it. My talk and workshops will be on the topic of learning – strategies for making learning more effective and persistent. My boss John is really the one to “blame” here because it was him who once suggested the book “Make it Stick” to me. That sparked my interest and sent me into a deep rabbit hole of learning about learning. I hope to empower other members of the community in their learning efforts and also to learn a lot myself in the process. Teaching others is the best way to learn after all!

What is your goal now, what do you want to achieve next?

I have just gotten the news that my submission for yet another conference, DevConf in South Africa, has been accepted as well! This time it will be a completely different talk – I'll be analysing the software bug that caused the crash of a rocket (Ariane 5 flight 501) from the point of view of a quality engineer. It will basically be an Air Crash Investigations episode but about a software failure. Fun!

It sounds like you have many interests – what do you want to focus on learning next?

There is so much to learn and so little time! 

Apart from upskilling myself in testing tools and other technical topics such as coding and test automation, I definitely want to be more actively involved in the testing community. I'm working on resurrecting the Ministry of Testing Prague meetups – one small meetup has already taken place (many thanks to Showmax for sponsoring us!) and I hope that together we can make the local community grow, thrive, and learn from each other.

Eva at the Ministry of Testing meetup at Showmax

Some could also hear your engaging talks about autism. Why is it an important topic for you?

It's a topic that is close to my heart – it was just a couple years ago that I found out that I'm autistic and the knowledge has changed my life in very profound ways. It has enabled me to accept myself for who I am and to finally get the tools and support I need. And that is what originally got me into public speaking despite being absolutely terrified of it. I have given online talks about autism and neurodiversity on several occasions: at TestBash Leadership (Ministry of Testing's online conference), at Showmax and at several other companies. I felt driven to pass the knowledge forward, share my personal story and what I've learned about myself with the hope it might help somebody else. If I've made just one other person's life better it was worth it.

Showmax CMS team attended DjangoCon 2022 in Porto where they learnt about Django and the things you can do with it, about the developer community around Django and how Django can be used in a wide variety of ways, from giving opportunities to get into coding with Django Girls to how to use hidden features of the framework to do things you didn’t even know you wanted to do! We share a list of recordings of very interesting and insightful talks from Django 2022. conference that we liked.

Experiences from DjangoCon 2022 in Porto

After a year of just virtual events taking place due to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the Django community finally gathered in person for the DjangoCon 2022 conference and chose a very beautiful site – the city of Porto. Located in northwest Portugal, Porto is known for its rich history, stunning architecture, and thriving startup scene. Needless to say, we were excited to attend the conference and learn from the experts behind the Django framework, which has been a crucial tool in building Showmax's Content Management System (CMS).

During our visit to Porto, we were able to explore the city's famous landmarks and attractions, such as the iconic Clérigos Tower and the Cais da Ribeira. We were also treated to the city's famous golden sunset views and sampled its delicious seafood and world-renowned port wine. It was a wonderful learning opportunity and a chance to network with our peers, but also a moment of exploring the rich culture and history of this vibrant and dynamic city.

The event was held in The Super Bock Arena (Pavilhão Rosa Mota) which was definitely a good choice. The venue provided ample space for attendees to network and enjoy the talks and workshops. One of the unique features that stood out was the roof tour, which was a great opportunity for attendees to take a break from the conference and experience a different perspective of the city. The tour finished with a tasting of traditional port wine poured into a cup made out of chocolate!

The conference was full of amazing speakers, which were not only talking about Django and the magic things you can do with it but also about our developer community and how Django can be used in a wide variety of ways, from giving opportunities to get into coding with Django Girls to how to use hidden features of the framework to do things you didn’t even know you wanted to do!

One of the most interesting talks was done by Daniel Roy Greenfeld (@pydanny), the legend behind the series of books called Two Scoops of Django, which every Django developer has used, directly or indirectly, to learn how to build things with the framework at some point in their career. During his talk on Scaling from one to Billions, Daniel delved into the fundamental aspects of being a good developer and how to translate these skills into projects that can impact billions of people while keeping in mind the ethical considerations that arise from such influential work. In the end, Daniel’s talk had little to do with Django itself, but left us with a lot to think about regarding our daily job and how it affects people around the world.

Another speaker, Katie Mclaughlin, made us think "What should you have to worry about?” She presented her view about the multiple trends we have popping up all the time on our daily job as developers and how to identify the ones that are actually worth our attention or even our time. In the talk she described in detail three main topics: Stable and Scalable Infrastructure, Reliable and Resilient Code, and Thoughtful and Thriving Community. We really recommend you watch her talk as it was not only very informative but also presented in a very playful and fun way.

On a more technical side, we had a lot of amazing speakers talking about different topics, but the ones who stand out the most for us were:

Add Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to Django in Mere Minutes: we had the opportunity to learn from Justin Mayer (@Jmayer) about the importance of Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), what are the types available and, of course, how to add it to Django in mere minutes!

Introducing Django Ninja: presented by Vitaliy Kucheryaviy, who walked us through a new way of building REST APIs in Django that uses python type hints in a clever way to validate, convert and serialize the endpoints’ inputs and outputs, and also automate API documentation!

“Observe!”: Honza Král (@honzakral) covered many useful tips and tricks to help improve monitoring, observability, and debugging of the running Django applications, such as logging, APM (application performance monitoring), distributed tracing, error tracking, and other things which are essential for any production Django app.

Handling Django in highly concurrent & scale environment: Tarun Garg told us about his journey toward trying to improve the performance of such things as Django admin pagination, text search, and Django models caching in a highly concurrent environment, which was a very educational experience for us!

	By the end of every conference day there was a chance for people to participate in the Lightning Talks, giving five minutes to each speaker to talk about a topic of their choice. This was a really nice opportunity for those who wanted to have their first talk in a less strict format. That doesn’t mean that the talks were not serious or anything like that. We listened to multiple speakers talking about various interesting topics. For example, we listened to a talk about the maintainer of django-upgrade, which quickly presented a tool to us which will make the upgrade of Django major versions easier. It was a major announcement which the Django community has been waiting quite a while for.

In conclusion, the Django Conference is a testament to the thriving and dedicated community of developers using the Django framework. From all around the world, individuals and teams are utilizing Django to build impressive and innovative projects. The community of Django users is a major factor in the continued success and popularity of the framework within the Python ecosystem. The conference was very well organized – the great venue, interesting talks, and inspirational networking were wrapped up with an excellent final party and the extra addition of a free boat trip around the city of Porto. It was a very nice addition to switch the focus from the conference and get to know and enjoy this wonderful city from an unusual angle.

We are already looking forward to DjangoCon 2023, which this time will be in yet another amazing city: Edinburgh! Hopefully this time we might even be one of the speakers telling the world about the crazy things we do with this amazing technology in order to bring moments of joy to our users!

Thanks Bogdan Bodnar for co-writing this post!

DjangoCon 2022 in Porto: Insights from the World’s Biggest Django Conference

This article provides a comprehensive guide to developing a design system for marketing landing pages using the Ruby on Rails framework. We'll look at the different components of a design system, how to integrate them into the Ruby on Rails framework using view_component libraries, and the benefits of using a design system for marketing landing pages. We'll also discuss how to leverage a Lookbook to create a visually appealing landing page experience. We'll provide an in-depth exploration of the different features of Ruby on Rails and how to use them to build a design system. Finally, we'll offer some tips and best practices for integrating design system components into your Ruby on Rails application. With this article, you will gain the knowledge you need to create an effective and visually appealing design system for your marketing landing pages.

Implementation of the Design System with View_component Libraries

A design system is a tool to simplify design creation as well as software development. Its creation for the Showmax platform was a true challenge and you can read more about it in Showmax Design System: The Precious. Our Precious introduces the roots of all the designs, including logos, icons, or foundations like colours, spacing, borders, and more. The design system also states which elements arise from the roots. And for each of the Showmax platforms we have a specific library including elements like buttons, containers, status messages, input fields, and others. Anybody creating a new design or developing it in the code can easily find the right element in the library and focus on the problem instead of redesigning the basics from scratch. To put the Design System into practice, we had to find a way to transfer the libraries from Figma to coders' screens.

Implementation in the Backend-Alpha team 

In my team (that is focused on user acquisition) we maintain and build upon those crucial first steps of a Showmax user's journey. Our team's jurisdiction is over what we call "the Landing Pages" and "the Secure Pages". The Landing Pages are a huge array of static HTML pages. They all link the user to our authorization service and eventually the authorization service links them to the payments journey. We refer to the auth and payments journey as "the Secure Pages".

In the marketing pages, the tech stack consists of the NextJS framework (a React based framework that enables server-side rendering and the generation of static websites). The secure pages are several standalone Ruby on Rails applications.

We knew from the very beginning that no matter what the design system's code would be written in, both the Marketing pages and the Secure pages would be using identical CSS. We needed to find a clever way to share this style code. The obstacle was the significant difference in environments between a modern next-js app written in typescript, bundled with Webpack and a few several-years-old Rails apps running Sprockets to bundle their assets.

Before I get into the code sharing, let's quickly talk about UI components and what form we think they are most effective in.

I would define UI components as simple functions or classes that spit out styled html. Nothing more. They should follow the single responsibility principle and be void of any business logic. Essentially they should be "dumb" and they shouldn't do much with their input other than displaying it however you tell them to display it i.e with various CSS class modifiers or simple arguments like “dark” or “light” to indicate what style the component should be.

If you're familiar with some of the React/Redux design patterns there is a concept of "container components" and "presentation components". Container components are all rendered higher in the state tree and are therefore closer to the data source. They make decisions about what will be rendered (some text string for example) while the presentation components will take that text string no matter what the content is and style it in the way that they're told to. If they take any arguments on initialization the arguments should only be about style, nothing else.

We were really only concerned with presentation components in this project and a vanilla Rails project leaves a lot to be desired in this department. If you want to stick with the default libraries you can split your views up into partials for instance, but partials don’t have a method signature so we can’t just glance at the file and know exactly what data is required to render a partial correctly. Furthermore, partials and views know too much about the controllers that render them. Because they have access to the controllers’ instance variables it's tempting to access this data in the partial. If you are accessing an instance variable in a partial, you tend to lose the reusability. The partial is now coupled to this controller action. If you want to reuse it, you need to make sure that same instance variable exists wherever else you need the partial.

In my opinion, the best way to easily add UI components to a Rails project without worrying about javascript is ViewComponent. It's fairly simple and easy to wrap your head around. You don’t need to think about “global state” or “redux” or  “hooks”. In the end you get a ViewComponent::Base class that simply allows you to write a ruby class that renders html.

Container components and higher-level business logic would be implemented as the UI Components would start to become used in production, with more context.

So we left them as open and flexible as possible.

For example, here is our Ruby CheckBox component:

#ruby#
ruby
# ruby class description
module BeDesignSystem
  class CheckboxComponent < ViewComponent::Base

    def initialize(label_text: nil, id: nil, name: nil, value: nil, checked: false, html_options: {})
      super
      @id = id
      @name = name
      @value = value
      @label_text = label_text
      @checked = checked
      @html_options = html_options.merge({ id: @id, class: 'smFormCheck_input' })
    end
  end
end

#ruby#
<% # the erb template for BeDesignSystem::CheckboxComponent %>
<label class="smFormCheck">
  <%= check_box_tag @name, @value, @checked, @html_options %>
  <span class="smFormCheck_label"><%= @label_text %></span>
</label>

And the related React component for the landing pages:

#typescript#
type CheckboxProps = {
  text: string;
  id?: string;
};

const Checkbox = ({ text, id }: CheckboxProps): JSX.Element => (
  <label htmlFor={id} className={styles.smFormCheck}>
    <input className={styles.smFormCheck_input} id={id} type="checkbox" />
    <span className={styles.smFormCheck_label}>{text}</span>
  </label>
);

export default Checkbox;

The important thing is that you can call these with whatever arguments you want but in the end the html structure is the same in both environments:

#html#
 <label for="check-id" class="smFormCheck">
    <input type="checkbox" name="name" id="check-id" value="value" class="smFormCheck_input" />
    <span class="smFormCheck_label">First checkbox</span>
</label>

So as a team of two, one working in React, the other in view_component, we would be able to share styles as long as we kept the html structured the same and used classes only as CSS selectors.

Which was easy to do for us as we already use the BEM model for our CSS. https://getbem.com/introduction/

The challenging part – Rails apps with Sprockets

If you're familiar with Rails, you might wonder why sharing CSS between Rails and any other web based framework would be worth writing a blog about. They both speak the universal language of Javascript and you can easily bundle CSS using a bundler like webpack! But this wasn't so easy for us because our Rails apps we were working with Sprockets. Sprockets is old fashioned and handles everything much differently than webpacker. Without webpacker we had no package.json or any way to consume npm modules in the Rails apps. 

So we couldn't create an npm module that would just allow the marketing pages and the secure pages to

#typescript#
import styles from "be_design_system/form_check.module.scss";


We needed a way to do that and feed the styles to Sprockets.

In one repo we wrote an npm package and a Ruby gem. We separated the ruby and javascript code at the top level into separate directories.

be_design_system is where we had our SCSS files

app is where our gem code is. It's a Rails engine, which helped us tremendously as Rails engines can contain a miniature sub Rails app in their test directory. This gives us the ability to run another engine called Lookbook (more on this later) where we can prototype, document, and show off our new UI components in real time as we develop them.

In the Ruby engine I was able to import the SCSS and process the files by sprockets:

#ruby#
 config.assets.paths   << File.expand_path('../../be_design_system', __dir__)


Sprockets can then just be used like this to include our assets:

#scss#
*= require be_design_system/form_check

#ruby#
spec.files         = `git ls-files -- '*.rb' '*.scss' '*.erb'`.split("\n")

We can exclude any non-npm packages from our final gem build. It was an unconventional way to cut out code duplication. While it did cause a mild headache in the beginning due to sprockets not being out of the box configured to consume SCSS module files i.e. “button.module.scss” The end result is quite nice. We have all our design system code relating to our team in one place and when we need to jump into the different worlds (e.g. TypeScript vs Ruby), we have this one place that helps make the context switching a little easier.

Now that we have made these UI components available to any of our Rails apps, they are still useful to anyone other than me and my teammate who built this with me. I know what they all look like but how does another team member really know if "Primary Button" will work for them in their project?

https://github.com/ViewComponent/lookbook

Lookbook started out as a pet project of Mark Perkins. If you are familiar with a component gallery called Story Book, this is very similar but much simpler.

When you create a new ViewComponent class you have the option to generate a "preview" file. These are just erb|slim|haml templates where we can render our components with test data. You can even set up a controller class to serve up these files with some data fetched over the http, for instance, or you can just use the controller to parse some fixture files to hydrate your preview classes.

What's so cool about lookbook is how little effort is required to get it working. Even for someone working without webpack. It doesn't need any fancy javascript (it works with or without js precompilers).

To get it up and running you only need to install the gem and navigate to localhost:3000/lookbook. If you already have some preview files, they will be there in all their glory:

You might have noticed that there is a source code button. There you can see the ruby / template that is rendering this preview. When you make changes to this ruby file, lookbook has a websockets connection setup that refetches this page (lookbook renders your component in an Iframe and that Iframe is dynamically refreshed).

What I find even more helpful is the html view. It's extremely handy to have a quick way of flipping back and forth between html and rendered html without all the clutter of chrome dev tools. Many of our components render various data-something attributes for data transfer between the server and the client. This allows you to quickly test that your changes are working properly and debug any weirdness.

So we have components, we have a way to share them and so far we've done all of this with sprockets as our js transpiler. What more could we want?

As you can see above we have blocks of code, a summary, and a little window where the button is rendered so you can see everything you need to render this component. Lookbook renders these by parsing button.md.erb so it's an erb-ified markdown doc. Enhancing this beyond just a basic markdown document actually gives you a ton of power. For instance, each one of these files (called a page) has a page, next_page, previous_page, and pages variable. This allows you to intricately reference and interlink them. You can use ruby to dynamically write docs.

#erb#
<%= 10.times do %>
  something repetitive
<% end =%>


So I hope you got something out of this article. If nothing else, just the curiosity to think about adding a design system to your project. Be sure to checkout Lookbook and ViewComponent

Using view_component for Design System Implementation in Rails Projects

Tomorrow, we are migrating our website to the Showmax.Engineering  domain. We are changing hosting, administrative framework, and the overall look & feel. To make the website easy to manage for our back office and talent acquisition teams, we chose to build it on Prismic.

For RSS subscribers, just change the link to: https://showmax.engineering/feed/ (the original link https://tech.showmax.com/feed.xml will be redirected to the new one).

MultiChoice Group is the leading Pay TV provider in Sub-Saharan Africa, and clear market leader in most countries. Its strategy is to offer the best local and international content across multiple platforms to customers wherever they are. 

The group’s strength lies in its focus on local language and culture, its entrepreneurial spirit and the quality of its workforce. Over the years MultiChoice has built a successful track record of identifying trends early, adapting them for the markets in which it operates and leveraging them to maximum advantage. 

The group generates revenues mainly by collecting subscription fees, with a moderate contribution from advertising revenue. 

Build its Pay TV and SVOD subscriber base 

Attract innovative and motivated employees

Third Party Data & Analytics Vendors, Consultancy partners

The role of Head of Customer Analytics exists to lead the delivery of analytics and data science projects to support business planning, development and execution of Showmax strategy, and performance measurement. 

Partner with teams from across Showmax, and the wider MultiChoice Group to develop customer and customer segment understanding, opportunity identification and sizing, and lead the development of analytic assets (segmentations, predictive models) that support user growth. ▪ Lead the development of the analytics platforms, data sources and analytics and data science tools to meet changing business needs 

Collaborate with senior leaders across Showmax and MultiChoice to clarify key business questions and scope and prioritise major analytic tasks that lead to actionable outcomes and the creation of business value. 

Develop analytical insights into the underlying drivers of commercial performance supporting the development of a data led customer strategy. 

Lead the delivery of a portfolio of Analytical assets utilising advanced analytics, data science, AI and machine learning techniques where applicable to business problems. 

Deliver customer segmentation that supports a better understanding of behaviors and value drivers within the customer base including Customer Lifetime Value. 

Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to develop the technology to deliver leading automated marketing and communications. 

Regularly track and deliver insights to track performance and understand the drivers of acquisition, disconnections, and churn, understand reasons, trends and dynamics and; 

Develop short, medium and long term recommendations across the customer lifecycle to drive improvements in the customer lifetime value.

Manage the development of the data sources & data engineering to transform that data into usable structures supporting Analytics. 

Work with Technology, Engineering and Group teams to implement the latest developments in Data and Analytics technology. 

Manage budget for Analytics tools, data engineering, and data development. 

Build and manage a team of Analysts, Data Scientists and Data Engineers. 

Strong experience leading and developing teams within an industry with large amounts of customer, product and channel data and a fast moving commercial environment. (TV or entertainment experience is desirable but not essential) 

Experience in working with senior leaders to develop commercial strategy with support from analytics and data science.

A natural affinity with the use of data to solve commercial challenges – you may well have a career background in conducting Analytics or Data Science or Data Engineering. 

Must have a passion for leveraging data and insights to drive profitable customer growth.

Strong capability in driving actionable insights from data 

A good working knowledge of Data, Analytics and Data Science tools and technologies, a proven ability to manage and develop technically skilled talent within these disciplines.

A good understanding of the wider technology ecosystem around Analytics including but not limited to data architecture, analytics and data visualisation tools, Cloud based technologies (e.g.: AWS/Azure) 

Ability to understand business objectives and align to CVM, CX and Retention  

Equipment that you prefer - Lenovo or Apple laptop, monitors, etc.

Education - internal knowledge sharing, conferences, online courses, time allocation for learning purposes

Ergonomic workspace, good coffee and snacks in the office

Showmax is one of the largest and most successful subscription video on demand services serving sub-Saharan Africa. Showmax apps are available for smart TVs, smartphones, tablets, computers, media players and gaming consoles. The engineering team has the unique challenge of supplying shows from Hollywood’s biggest studios, local African productions, and live sports from around the world to consumers in developing economies - all without compromising quality.

We're building a brand new frontend team with focus on high performance video streaming applications for leanback devices (low-powered Smart TVs, set top boxes, Chromecast). You would cooperate very closely with product and design to create fast and responsive applications that would still be good looking and with great usability.

This brings us to the way we cooperate with product and design. We work in a dual-track fashion where we have a developer, a product manager, and a designer working together on new features. You can be part of it from the very beginning - brainstorming ideas, commenting on UX, wireframes and designs, as well as on technical aspects and complexity of proposed solutions.

Also, despite working on large screen TVs you can’t really emulate, we can ensure fully remote work. We have a TV lab in the office which you can access remotely to control, develop, and debug the app from your home.

We're looking for a highly experienced JavaScript engineer that also has great knowledge of web technologies and would be passionate about the job.

We have very diverse teams which are often working remotely. Good communication is key as well as English proficiency.

The team of project managers, senior agile specialists, and delivery managers (Project Management Office - PMO), located in Prague, Czech Republic and Johannesburg, South Africa, operates across countries and regions within various projects and initiatives. Within particular engineering teams, departments, and also the whole Connected Video business unit, we provide support throughout the whole project lifetime. 

Through mapping and solving dependencies and impediments, the PMO streamlines the work of all the engineering teams. The development and delivery planning is crucial, as is risk management through effective PMO processes.

We manage projects on a day-to-day basis, organize the agile ceremonies, and collect and share the reports on progress with various stakeholders.

About the team

How we work

Read our blog posts

Women at Showmax: Eva Podbrdská

DjangoCon 2022 in Porto: Insights from the World’s Biggest Django Conference

Using view_component for Design System Implementation in Rails Projects

WE ARE MIGRATING THE WEBSITE

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Using view_component for Design System Implementation in Rails Projects

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