September 22

Making Apps that Make Movies

Chris Dhanaraj, Senior UI Engineer, Netflix

Movies and TV shows are filled with magic — from the viewers’ perspective, at least. Getting a production off the ground can be less than magical. It’s surprisingly riddled with manual processes and inefficiency — but not if Chris Dhanaraj has anything to say about it.

As a Senior UI Engineer at Netflix Studios, Chris builds apps that make the complex movie and TV production process simpler and more streamlined. In this episode of Decoded, host Sydney Lai chats with Chris about the evolution of Netflix from a DVD-shipping service into a SaaS platform that millions of people invite into their lives each day. They also discuss the differences between building software for consumer use vs. business use, as well as how creativity can be expressed in a B2B environment.

Listen to the episode to learn: 

• How to design a unified style across a suite of applications
• How Chris leverages React, an open-source front-end JavaScript library for building user interfaces or UI components
• Insights from scaling Netflix engineering into the company it is today
• What engineers should be mindful of when building for business users