Netflix engineer on solving their "Black Mirror S1.E1 Pig f–-er" problem [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
It later uncannily mirrored a later story about David Cameron, former UK prime minister, sticking his phallus inside a pig's mouth when he was in university.
The pig was dead, and decapitated, which makes it okay I guess?
The fact that they likely spent millions of dollars in dev time to do this really shows you how big tech companies lose sight of priorities as they mutate into behemoths
The hard part isn't implementing the change - although having to implement it in n different places doesn't help - the hard part is having to coordinate the change with n different teams to get the change out.
I feel this is the reason why microservices end up being attacked by clueless developers, because ultimately they are the scapegoat for organizational issues.
The primary selling point of microservices is that they are a management tool, as an org can use them to build teams with a very specific and clear-cut set of responsibilities. Microservices end up being a realization of Conway's law. Consequently, microservices end up being leveraged in intra-organizational conflicts.
It's not that microservices cause these issues, but that the organizations that run microservices cause these issues. If you have the same team managing multiple microservices, these problems don't happen because they don't have the coordination problems that separate teams endure, specially when managers clash.
It's the reason covered in the video you're commenting on, though. Except that "teams who happen to own microservices experience org coordination issues" is spun as "microservices owned by teams cause organizational issues".
From their inception, microservices were always a management tool, which happens to have operational and technical benefits and tradeoffs. If a project goes through challenges because they can't get all teams on the same page, that is not a technical problem.
Why not decide if it's generally seasons or episodes that need to be sorted above and introduce a simple tag to accomplish.
IE: Black Mirror S4 is given a promo/priority flag and any season marked promo is sorted to the top.
In general, this implies that video metadata is immutable from the source...because the easiest way to do this would be to change the metadata. This is strange because Amazon renumbers episodes and seasons for some foreign shows (the Goes Wrong Show comes to mind).
Anyway, it seems the easiest way would have been to change the preview component to play a specified episode, then add a field and UI to set that specified episode on the series metadata (defaulting to S01E01). Then the question is, "who sets that and how?" That leads into a rabbit hole of who would actually do that, which is probably going to be different for different shows. And any human intervention in the media process will be ugly and awkward. But - since this is a human override, there should obviously be a workflow exception. So there needs to be a permission on the users and a field on the shows.
That's a couple of changes to a few different systems. How do you add a field to series metadata? How do you add a UI option to the metadata management? How do you add a permission on a user/group?
Digging in might take a week or two. Implementing the changes depends on the change control and testing requirements of the various systems. A quarter to deploy from dev to production might be accurate. In a smaller shop it would be a week or two, but Netflix needs to worry about breaking their stuff.
Upon reflection, "12 Monkeys" is another movie that was thought-provoking but will probably not get another play-through from me (well done Gilliam?). Perhaps as you suggest, reality has just become a bit too much and I'll just put "The Sound of Music" on on repeat from here on out, or whatever the cinematic equivalent of paintings of boats and pretty landscapes may be.
“Come and See” however I don’t want to see again, despite it possibly being the best film ever.
It's the only episode with any gross out factor. And it's pretty intense in that respect for many people - enough to turn them off a great series.
as gross as the news similar thing actually did happen in real life?
https://news.yahoo.com/british-prime-minister-reveals-put-00...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/david-cameron-accused-of-sex-a...
The themes and ideas presented presented in later episodes left me far more shocked and moved. “San Junipero” and “Smithereens” were incredibly moving for me personally, while other episodes were absolutely fascinating because they took some aspects of our society and humanity and took them to their logical extreme.
The most shocking part of all is how true to reality most episodes are. What set S01E01 apart was it didn’t rely on sci-fi to tell its story, which is the only way in which it isn’t on brand.
For a particular show, instead of recommending to viewers to start at S01E01 (which might put people off the show due to that particular episode being distastefully vulgar to some), by default start at S04E01 (which was actually the first episode produced by Netflix after they acquired the show).
It turned out that this seemingly simple requirement went against a very deeply ingrained (almost fundamental) assumption in many places in their systems, that shows always start at the earliest available episode.
In the end, implementing this seemingly simple requirement landed up being (according to the streamer) a 4 month project.
Season 1 episode 1 was one of the best of the show... Netflix dumbed the show down later.