Netflix is a software company. It was a pioneer in massive adoption of the Amazon Web Services, and as startup veterans remember, early AWS EC2 performance could be drastically affected by sharing with a Netflix node!
Netflix culture is widely known for taking freedom and responsibility, and Open Source flourished under that model. Not only Netflix is a massive user of OSS, but it also contributes back enormously, as well as pushes the envelope on the standards and rigor.
Netflix By the Bay has long roots of shared community members, meetups, favorite technologies, and beliefs. SF Scala co-organizer Jason Swartz, along with other regular speakers Manish Pandit and Brendan McAdams, wrote with Scala at Netflix and presented on it.
There are many important innovations that Netflix started. Their use of AWS was a heavy dependence on “cloud” before SaaS/PaaS became a thing. They had to build numerous tools to launch machines in predictable ways, pioneering cloud imaging and deployment, as well as scaling up and down, and debugging - infrastructure as code, as we know it now.
The business of Netflix grew because of personalization. A new book, “That Will Never Work,” by one of the Netflix cofounders, Marc Randolph, highlights the recommender algorithms as the engines of retention, in addition to the subscription that alleviated the wait for DVDs with the watching queues. Evolving over the decades, those algorithms had lead to a deep, thorough reliance on Data Science and Machine Learning for all aspects of the business, including recommendations, ads, their attribution, and even the design of the original productions based on the movie content itself.
We’ve been privileged to host multiple Netflix engineers, data scientists, and leaders By the Bay.
Here are a few highlights, available, as always, on our free YouTube channel, functional.tv.
At Scaly By the Bay 2019, Netflix Senior Software Engineers Jeremy Smith and Jonathan Indig from the Personalization Infrastructure team will introduce, Polynote, a Scala-first, IDE-inspired polyglot notebook built from scratch that has substantially improved productivity for hybrid Scala + Python use case for Netflix Personalization researchers.
Also, Netflix Senior Software Engineer Savin Goyal and Architect Ville Tuulos will present a talk Human-Centric ML Infrastructure at Netflix on 11/15 sharing their experiences on building Metaflow, a Python library that empowers data scientists at Netflix to prototype, build, deploy, and operate end-to-end machine learning solutions.
This year, Netflix is also supporting Scale By the Bay as a Gold sponsor and you can meet the hiring team on the expo floor.
Do not hesitate and book your ticket to attend the conference.
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