By Samir Jafferali, Principal Systems Engineer
DNS (Domain Name System) is one of the most critical services at Hulu. Back in 2015, we published a blog post about our DNS infrastructure, which I highly recommend reading if you haven’t already. Since then, our DNS infrastructure has changed significantly to meet the features and scale of our growing organization.
How DNS Is Used at Hulu
IP addresses provide the remote resource locations that computers need to access in order to resolve websites like hulu.com. DNS (Domain Name System) was created to translate hostnames into usable IP addresses.
Here at Hulu, we have many services that communicate with…
Every so often, we pass the mic to a member of our Product Design team. What inspires them, what are they watching, a new band they love, a book they can’t put down — it’s all fair game. This month, we’re spotlighting Senior Product Designer and ancient civilization aficionado, Renee Cao.
What is your role at Hulu? What do you work on?
I’m a senior product designer based in the Seattle office. I work on the Design System & Platform team, focusing on the Living Room space.
In the 10 years I’ve been at Hulu, I’ve worked on many features…
By Billie Sue Chafins, VP, Software Development and Nick Brookins, VP, Software Development
This July, Hulu’s U.S.-based tech team held its seventh annual — and first completely virtual — Hackathon. For 10 days, teams collaborated remotely to develop projects designed to better serve Hulu’s viewers, solve complex technological problems, and explore exciting new product possibilities.
Despite teams being entirely remote, a record number of Hulu employees and interns participated in the Hackathon this year. Interns who’d never interacted in person teamed up across states and time zones to create some of the event’s most impressive projects. …
Designing for the Living Room
by Dru Sidle, Principal Product Designer
You finish working a long day and you badly need a break, a respite from balancing several projects all with end-of-the-week deadlines. You could go for a jog or clean up around your place, but neither would give you the pause for your mind to recover. So you settle into your couch (by yourself or with a loved one), pick up the remote, and start watching your favorite tv show or movie.
Ahhhhhhhhh… you can finally relax. You even notice that your headspace feels lighter.
What you aren’t likely noticing is all of the…
Hello! Welcome to Hulu Product Design.
Who we are
We’re a group of designers, researchers, writers, and more who work on how people experience Hulu. We strive to bring that vision to life in a way that feels inspired, refined, and even magical. Above all, we aim to create meaningful relationships that bring people closer to their favorite content.
What you’ll find here
We want to give you regular peeks into how we design for the entertainment space and the unique challenges that we face. We want to connect, inform, and inspire through content written by designers, writers, and researchers at Hulu.
This only works if you’re curious too.
Ask us anything, suggest topics you’d like us to write about — it’s all good. Leave a comment here.
The Behind the Scenes series is a collection of posts and videos designed to give you a peek at the inner workings of the Hulu tech team and introduce you to the men and women who build the systems that bring TV to the internet.
Name: Darshana Umakanth
Title: Senior Software Development Lead
Joined Hulu: August 11th, 2014
College / University: Purdue
Tell us about your journey. How did you end up at Hulu?
I attended Purdue University, where I graduated in 2013 with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. During my senior year, I was a member of a…
By Sean Barag, Senior Software Developer
For fans of: programming languages, javascript, typescript, coffeescript
It’s been a while since we’ve talked about our Living Room application on this blog, but that’s because big things have been happening! Last year, Kirk Yoder described how a unified runtime allows Hulu to deploy a single codebase across multiple clients. That’s still very much the case, so let’s spend some time a little bit further up the stack, in the JavaScript source itself.
The short version: For living room devices not including Roku or Apple TV, Hulu used to be written in CoffeeScript, but…
By Han Nie, Associate Technical Program Manager
At the 2019 Hulu Beijing Hackathon, 140 Hulugans tinkered away for more than 30 hours on 27 innovative projects. During this event, we were showered with various intriguing ideas, ranging from an auto-piloted aircraft to an app that automatically takes selfies.
Smart Video Ads by AI
Powered by state-of-the-art deep learning models, this project automatically integrates advertisement into specific area of the background (Wall, TV set, etc), incurring little disruption for viewer experience.
by Joe Bentley, SVP of Engineering and Rafael Soltanovich, VP of Software Development
This summer, Hulu’s tech team held its annual Hackathon in Santa Monica and Seattle. More than 100 Hulugans and interns spent 48 hours designing and coding 40 projects that pushed creative and technical boundaries.
In the spirit of the Hackathon, teams worked tirelessly on features that aimed to improve Hulu viewers’ experiences and Hulu employees’ lives, including an enhanced navigation tool for Hulu HQ’s growing campus, a feature that allows co-watching on Hulu, and an eye-controlled remote. …
By Lauren Bridge, Senior Software Developer, Zack Tanner, Senior Software Developer, and Matt Wong, Senior Software Development Lead
With the launch of our updated live guide on Hulu.com, tvOS, and Roku, we thought it’d be interesting to give a behind the scenes look at how we built the live guide experience and outline the technical challenges the team solved for, specifically when building for web.
Simplifying the Guide Layout
A significant challenge was rendering all the channels and a few hours of their programs into a grid. Our initial plan was to use CSS grid layouts to structure the layout.
…
