MUBI Roku channel

I’ve been a MUBI customer for some time now and have used Roku to access (MUBI is a curated, hand-picked films streaming service). Unfortunately, the original MUBI Roku application was terribly poor - basic, a single home screen that holded 30 films only and a lot of other issues 🤔!

As a client, this was quite unfair, considering that users of other platforms, such as Web or Android had access to a library and they could even search!

After an initial contact to their support team (months back) about this 🐛, I got in touch with them later and explained that I could offer to help, as a software developer. My perspective was, talk is cheap, can I do something about it!? 🤗

Got trough the interview process, and was lucky to be given the opportunity to work on the MUBI Roku channel. It seems that it’s quite hard to find a Roku developer and my skills are convincing. I do have to say for you readers that developing on Roku is not trivial!

The Roku community is super small but very supportive, a big thank you to Chris Dwyer Perkings , Joe Testa , Brian Leighty , George Cook , Mate Szlanka, Philippe Elsass , Tasevski, Bronley Plumb and Ben Combee (Ben works at Roku) for answering all my questions and support!

Here’re some of the things I’ve worked on:

  • Created a custom i18 translation system based in JSON Tokens
  • Made all components sizing dynamic (fullfiling all language needs)
  • Add support for all language translations
  • Channel performance measurement (signal beacons)
  • Created a search feature
  • Created the main layout
  • Reduce memory usage and computations by using “by reference” types
  • Removal of legacy system and migration of parts to new system
  • Improved perceived load time
  • Decluttering of global state
  • Composed fully custom layout through reusable components
  • Created reusable components (abstractions)
  • Split process through concurrency keeping UI free (vs networking and SG BRS tasks)
  • Structured the project arch in MVVM
  • MUX analytics
  • Created full documentation (processes, diagrams)
  • Created command line tooling for fast development
  • Created versioning based in semantic release
  • Created a changelog and automated it

I find great to be able to get customer feedback in real time, it’s absolutely fantastic!

Although I hoped MUBI invested more in Roku, it’s great to share and deliver this project to you guys and myself as a customer 👌

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