Netflix Hack Day — Spring 2016
by Daniel Jacobson, Ruslan Meshenberg, and Leslie Posada
Keeping with our roughly six-month cadence, Netflix recently hosted another fantastic Hack Day event. As was the case with our past installments, Hack Day is a way for our product development staff to take a break from everyday work to have fun, experiment with new technologies, collaborate with new people, and to generally be creative.
This time, we were lucky to have a team of Netflixers emerge to hack together a documentary video of the event. The following provides a peek into how the event operates:
We had an excellent turnout, including over 200 engineers and designers working on more than 80 hacks. The hacks themselves ranged from product ideas to internal tools to improvements in our recruiting process. We’ve embedded videos below, produced by the hackers, to some of our favorites. You can also see more hacks from several of our past events: November 2015, March 2015, Feb. 2014 & Aug. 2014:
As always, while we think these hacks are very cool and fun, they may never become part of the Netflix product, internal infrastructure, or otherwise be used beyond Hack Day. We are posting them here publicly to simply share the spirit of the event and our culture of innovation.
Thanks to all of the hackers for putting together some incredible work!
Netflix Zone
An alternate Netflix viewing experience created for the HTC Vive (VR). You just crossed over into…the Netflix Zone.
By Joey Cato, Adnan Abbas and Marco Caldeira
Spinnacraft
Integration of our open-source continuous delivery platform, Spinnaker, with Minecraft. Enough said.
By Daniel Reynaud, Andrea Guzzo, Ed Barker and Ed Bukoski
Tetris
Wish your recently watched row did not fall down from the top of your row list? Want to add other rows that we are not displaying to you yet? Presenting a desktop Netflix experience with drag and drop repositionable rows, pinned rows, and add/remove rows.
By Sanjit Bhattacharjee, Andy Chu, Shruti Nargundkar and Stephen Walz
Family Catch-up Viewing
See what your other profiles are watching in the player so you can know exactly where they left off in the episode. Now there’s no excuse to (accidentally) watch ahead!
By Lyle Troxell
QuietCast
You want to watch Marvel’s Daredevil on your Cast TV or Chromecast, but you just put your kid to bed in the next room. No problem, you plug in your headphones on your android tablet and cast the show. The audio plays from your phone while the cast target plays the video in silence.
By Kevin Morris, Baskar Odayarkoil and Shaomei Chen
Originally published at techblog.netflix.com on May 24, 2016.
