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Opening the Door to Simulmedia Engineering

Sanjay Jain
Sanjay Jain
Published: Jan. 13, 2015
Tech Blog

Welcome to the ceremonious first post on the Simulmedia Engineering Blog! While we could talk about our products and the value we provide to the market, this forum is just about technology -- providing you with transparency into the ideas and workings of a small group of technical people who are dedicated to disrupting TV as we all know it. Of course, if you want to know more about our business, just explore the rest of our website and you'll be able to access all the information you could possibly want.

As someone working in TV technology it's always interesting to see people's reactions when I talk about the fact that we are building a cutting-edge ad tech stack for linear television. The general response falls in the "oh you mean digital video, right, like YouTube?" or "that sounds like super legacy stuff!" Well the truth is we're taking an industry who's technical foundations are still rooted in the 1960s and building cutting-edge software and technology to bring it into the super modern age - think about what you probably already know about the sophistication of digital/online advertising, but then apply that intelligence to the TV in your living room. Simulmedia exists to do just that - bring richer advertising experiences to all of our users - and this blog will give you some insights into the technology we are building to do it.

Some quick data about Simulmedia Engineering:

  • We are a diverse group of NYC technologists from companies youve heard of. Our tech pedigree include Gilt Groupe, Akamai, Spotify, Pictela, Cisco, Cray Supercomputer, Business Insider, AppNexus, Amplify and many others.
  • We have backgrounds in building and operating high performance, scalable computing platforms, both terrestrial and cloud-based. As a result when we see core API response timesare 2s vs 1.75s, that is enough to make us go a little crazy.
  • We are not Agile purists, nor do we spend much time defining SDLC. We are grown-ups who work on the basis of trust. We all understand what we're trying to get to and why and we work accordingly. We also think Trello is pretty cool...

A bit about the Simulmedia tech stack (though much of this will be discussed throughout the blog):

  • We are AWS-based.
  • We love Amazon Redshift and embrace MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) design.
  • We use Ruby on Rails for our apps because Rails lets us work fast.
  • We build RESTful APIs in Jersey though were tinkering with Node.
  • We write ETLs in Pythonand creatively call this PETL.
  • We find Looker ( http://www.looker.com) useful for data exploration.
  • We have found creative ways to use the high performance key-value store Redis ( http://redis.io) and our project opensourced here: https://github.com/Simulmedia/bulkredis

Some visuals that might explain how/where we work:

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We work in a beautiful NYC loft - clearly we have an open req.

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We do lots of technical sharing & training...

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And lots of retraining (even basic skills need refinement).

hackday.png

We love hackdays to break the monotony

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and the company seems to love us for it.

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We believe in good food like Siggys.

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We work really hard and celebrate as one team.

The team at Simulmedia Engineering hope you enjoy the blog. Let us know if you have any questions or comments and hit up our careers page for open positions or just send your resume over to careers@simulmedia.com. We're always looking for smart fun people to join the team!

Happy 2015-
Sanjay from Simulmedia Engineering