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Platform Solutions

Developer Productivity

Who we are and what we do

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Netflix’s Growing Scale

  • 190+ Markets
  • ~150 MM Global Members
  • Multiple $B of content spend

*US & International figures as of Q2’19

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Key Drivers for Success

Redefine how

Content is imagined

and

Created

and

Distributed

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Netflix Developers

...are at the heart of achieving this success...

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Why does this team exist?

To amplify the ability of Developers in Netflix Engineering to deliver on their core missions.

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Why does this team exist?

We help maximize Developer Joy

and

Help them Get Stuff Done

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How do we do this?

By treating Developer Experience (DX) as a first class concern and focussing on it as a full-time mission.

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How do we do this?

And we do it by looking across all of their development tasks and creating a holistic, smooth experience.

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Simplify and Amplify

Productivity

Complexity

We reduce complexity

to increase productivity

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Our mission is to provide a rapid, scalable and predictable path to move applications and workflows from concept to production and to also enable maintaining them with minimum effort.

Platform Experience - Productivity

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Differentiators in our Identity

We are a team that creates targeted productivity experiences for Netflix Product teams.

We optimize for time to create business value

We connect experiences across different core platform primitives to make it cohesive for users.

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Developer Audience

We cover a wide variety of internal user profiles - UI developers, backend microservice owners, citizen developers and business users.

Requirements for the tools are just as diverse

as the end applications -

  • Studio Applications (never before built)
  • Highly available microservices and distributed systems
  • Streaming UI features
  • ...

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How do we do this?

US

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Why care about an integrated experience?

Bootstrap

API Discovery

REPL

Unit Test

SDK

Debug

Build

Profiling

Dependency Mgmt

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Bootstrap

API Discovery

REPL

Unit Test

Canary

Support

Prod Push

Pre-Prod

Metrics

Tracing

Lifecycle

Setup

Alerts

History

Security

Routing

SDK

Debug

Logging

Build

Profiling

Dependency Mgmt

Why care about an integrated experience?

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Some Sample Tools We Develop

  • SDK / CLI tools for PaaS / FaaS like experience
    • Node.JS, GoLang, Python based
  • Cloud Orchestration Tools
    • CI/CD workflows, operational abstractions
  • Large Scale Distributed Simulation Testing Framework
  • Traffic Replay and Testing Tools
  • GraphQL Development Framework
  • Visual User Experiences
    • PaaS UI, Operator UI, API explorers, Test Management UI

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Unique Challenges

  • Rapidly evolving requirements
  • Dealing with diverse developer and system profiles
    • Client needs vs server side needs
    • Node.JS vs Java
    • Containers vs VMs
    • Asynchronous vs Synchronous systems
    • REST vs gRPC vs GraphQL
    • Microservices vs Nanoservices vs FaaS
  • Abstracting things vs giving them control when they need it
  • Accurately measuring and optimizing developer and operator experience

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Opportunities Ahead

  • Unifying managed experience, while still providing fine grained control
  • Infrastructure as code so they can compose and extend freely
  • Early Defect Detection
    • Shift left insights; earlier, less expensive issues
  • Abstraction Levels
    • Progressive disclosure of features and complexity
  • Application Complexity
    • Scale from solving for services to solving for interacting sets of services

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I enjoy partnering with several teams to solve pain points and make our users’ daily work a breeze, sometimes in hacky ways :)

I’m also already getting ready for the next Hack Day!

Meet the Team

Ludovic Galibert

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I like working on solutions that help other developers go home at 5pm. Though I can talk about the team at length - two major things I love about it are:

(1) being able to discuss the most nerdy things with my teammates and �(2) being able to always learn something new from my teammates (from React to rock climbing).

Meet the Team

Mykyta Protsenko

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Java Champion and co-author of O'Reilly books "Java 9 Modularity" and "Modular Cloud Apps with OSGi". Always enjoyed working on tools and libraries to make development easier and faster, and currently really enjoying doing that at Netflix scale.

Spending as much time as possible climbing rocks. Being a full-time climber/dirtbag would be my alternative career ;-)

Meet the Team

Paul Bakker

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Meet the Team

I'm delighted to be designing and engineering here alongside brilliant and wide-ranging teammates. I've always leaped at the chance to improve beauty and pleasure of use for things around me, and it's uniquely satisfying to do that for other engineers.

�If there's not a laptop in front of me, I'm either on a motorcycle, on skis, at a piano, or watching a certain streaming service with my favorite person & dog.

David Simmer

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For me, each day at Netflix is an exciting opportunity to solve challenging problems. I enjoy working with a variety of languages and technologies to provide great developer experiences across the stack.

Food, music, and Wodehouse make me very happy.

Meet the Team

Kavitha Srinivasan

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After many years chasing startup success, I found a great place to work at Netflix. I am passionate about removing roadblocks for my team as well as our partners through creative integrations.

I can be found snowboarding at Kirkwood during the winter season.

Meet the Team

Daniel Zapata

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I love how working in DX mixes in aspects of UX, front-end, back-end, and devops; touching on all phases of the software development lifecycle. With DX initiatives I get the chance to go deep on a topic, while continuing to influence workflows with a broad impact.

The breadth of experience in our team provides both a great support structure, as well as continually challenging me to improve and learn new tools and techniques.

Meet the Team

Brian Leathem

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I try to anchor somewhere around user experience and user empathy in my professional work irrespective of the technical nature of it.

�My goal is to create a user focussed, high performance team that enjoys their work.

My team makes better technical decisions and latte art than me and I enjoy that.

Meet the Team

Vasanth Asokan

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Recent Externally Published Work

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Recent Daily Work - Samples

  • We optimized the ability of UI and client developers to develop and test previously untested and critical cloud APIs, by developing a request replay based testing strategy and tools and framework. We designed a UI based REPL tool to explore and share data access queries.

  • We are actively designing tools and frameworks to implement the GraphQL Schema Federation spec for use case in the Studio domain. We will soon be building a UI to reason about and operate a potentially large list of registered schemas.