– Going from PHP to Scala to Node and back to Scala for the back-end

– Tens of thousands of channels are created every night

– What exactly is Akka and the actor model

– Websockets are being used quite heavily

– A few Scala libraries that were useful for building this platform

– There’s a mobile front-end using React Native for Android and iOS

– Storing and caching TV listings with Gracenote

– Roughly ~25k lines of Scala and ~11k on the front-end in 2 repos

– Motivation for using React Native instead of using native languages

– How to deal with large show TVs with a massive audience

– The app is basically 3 screens

– Handling user uploaded gifs and link submissions

– What it was like building out the React Native front-end

– Reasons for picking DigitalOcean and using Kubernetes

– Most of the infrastructure is managed by Terraform

– What it was like to go from not using Kubernetes to going all-in with it

– (3) 2 GB of memory / 2 CPU core servers are running the cluster

– What it’s like developing a new feature and deploying it to production

– The database is backed up on a schedule and before schema changes

– Prometheus, Grafana, Kamon and Sentry are used for metrics and monitoring

– Pingdom is used for an external site monitor

– It took about a month to get confident in using Kubernetes

– Best tips? It’s going to take a while, hang in there

– Writing comments for your future self while learning

– Matt is on Twitter and most socials as @halfmatthalfcat and @couchmatehq