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We have joined the joint BBC Design + Engineering publication. If you want to keep following us, keep an eye out on the iPlayer feature page or just follow the whole blog! BBC Design + Engineering BBC D+E. Building the best BBC products, platforms and services for audiences in the UK and around the worldmedium.com

This post is coauthored by engineers across the different teams involved: Marc Burrows, Alex Chesters, Neil Craig, Sally Fletcher, Marc Littlemore, Nik Rahmel, and Lloyd Wallis. There is a lot of collaboration across the BBC’s Design & Engineering teams to bring the World Cup and Wimbledon to the BBC. From…

How to ingest AWS Lambda Log Streams from CloudWatch into an ELK monitoring stack — Anybody who uses AWS Lambda might have come across something like in the screenshot below when trying to access any kind of log, and felt emotions such as confusion, anger, and annoyance. Those emotions were probably even stronger if you have been spoilt by having an ELK stack for your…

API Engineers as Consultants in collaboration with user-facing product teams — iBL stands for iPlayer Business Layer — yes, we are ‘the API team’, but we are also the team that implements any shared business logic that affects iPlayer on any of the 3 key platforms (TV, Mobile and Web). As an engineer in the iBL team, we’ve got great responsibility…

Written by Nick Spragg and Nik Rahmel Over the past year, we have started personalising the iPlayer homepage a lot more than we did previously — with this came a re-architecture of the API. All the data any of the iPlayer clients require to show the complete homepage, be it…

Using Node.JS to build a web scraper from scratch — My time at university was defined by a very large part by my involvement in Student Media — the student newspaper, the student TV station, radio station. I still work with the Student Radio Association (see you at the awards in November?) …

Our journey to classify video frames as quickly as possible — with serverless parallelisation — In the BBC, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are currently being explored heavily by pretty much all product teams — Why? …

This week we spent spiking a new feature! Always very exciting. Would love to tell you what it is, but this is not the time nor the place. If you want to know, apparently I get more talkative after a beer. Anyway, for this feature our UX people really wanted…

I ordered a Raspberry Pi 3 the other day and it arrived today yay! When I got home I obviously was very keen to plug it in and give it a go, so I unplugged a plug and thought.. Oh crap A couple of weeks ago I started a Backup…