Geek's Day with Vijaya Sagar

1. Recently, Amagi organized Geek’s Day. Tell us more about it
Geek’s Day is a technology showcase event organized by engineers at Amagi to foster the culture of innovation in the company. The program was conceived with the following goals in mind.

• Enhance tech collaboration within teams through knowledge sharing
• Strengthen ‘innovation as a competitive advantage’ for the company
• Nurture the passion for technology in our engineers to create world-class products

We organize this company-wide event twice a year. It gives our teams a great platform to demonstrate their technology prowess, especially to young engineers who get a first-hand experience to see the big picture of how all the smaller modules that they work on come together to solve complex challenges for our clients. Many times, we even highlight incremental innovation that our teams have undertaken to improve our own approach to coding and product development. So, it’s not all always about how we have simplified life for customers. It’s also about how we are improving our own understanding of technology and sharing smarter ideas that other teams can implement in their workstack.

2. What was the focus of the recent edition of Geek’s Day?
The key focus was knowledge sharing across engineering teams based on lessons learnt from our failures and successes in the last couple of quarters. Over the last six months, as a company, we have significantly increased our capabilities in the area of live events production and broadcast. Cloud as a backbone infrastructure to deliver live events such as sports and news has been closely scrutinized owing to latency issues, challenges with ad insertion, and ability to replicate the broadcast-grade TV-viewing experience delivered on traditional delivery mechanisms such as satellite and fiber. Due to advancements in cloud technologies, access to high-speed internet, and innovation in the last-mile content delivery frameworks – all these have now made it possible to produce live events on the cloud and distribute them in a multiscreen environment. We expect a surge in demand from broadcasters who run hundreds of hours of live content every month to transition to cloud. And, we are developing some really cool tech to support their unique requirements.

A lot of Geek’s Day sessions were focused on practical do-s & don’t-s related to on-demand live event orchestration, fault tolerant distributed systems on the cloud, large scale media processing for live streams, application workflow orchestration, infrastructure as code, efficient CI/CD pipelines, enterprise grade inter-service messaging and reusable UI component designs.

The other hot topic was content analytics. As streaming becomes the new TV, metrices like viewership stats, ad impressions, ad opportunities, ad durations, top performing channels and more, need to be made available in real-time for content owners and platforms to manage their ad inventory, pricing, and to determine their strategies covering content genre, distribution markets, ad partnerships and so on. We are making early inroads in this segment and had several geeky features to preview.

3. How was the response given remote working in COVID times?
Geek’s Day, if held in normal circumstances would have been a day-long celebration, competition and knowledge exchange sessions. However, this time, we organized it across 10 days with teams joining through collaboration platforms. Overall, we had about 10 sessions, 25 speakers and nearly 400 man-hours of engagement. It just goes to show as humans how well we have adapted to the new pandemic situation. Even in our business, we continue to deliver broadcast-grade SLAs in these testing times. I am happy that we are able to carry that rigor in the areas of learning and development as well.

4. Amagi also organized a hackathon in partnership with HackerEarth in August. Is this part of Geek’s Day initiative?
Innovation has always been central to Amagi’s existence, growth and value we deliver from every stakeholder’s perspective – Customers, employees, investors or for that matter our media and entertainment industry. The hackathon was largely to engage the developer community in the experience band of 2-5 years, recognize and reward their tech problem-solving skills. We had more than 2,700 registrations with over 1,300 participants completing the GO CLOUD Challenge. We have an obligation to contribute and to sustain the spirit of innovation in the community. It also gives us an excellent opportunity to interact with bright minds and attract them to our vision of transforming the media and entertainment industry through application of innovative cloud technologies.

5. Do you have plans for expanding the Geek’s Day to outside the company?
In some ways, we are already doing that. We set up quarterly business reviews with key customers to give them a preview of our technology roadmaps. This helps us to align our products and delivery milestones to support their business goals. For others, we have our regular trade show formats to showcase tech innovation. While this year our events calendar has been impacted, we are looking at virtual platforms to bridge the gap. I would urge the readers of this blog to follow our website and social media channels for all such announcements.

Vijaya Sagar Vinnakota is the Head of Cloud Engineering at Amagi.