Omotayo Madein has been working as a distributed member of the publishing Team at Pluto TV — an Andela Partner Company — since April 2018. She joined Andela a month before that as a Senior Software Engineer after earning a B.Sc. in Software Engineering from the American University of Nigeria and an M.Sc. in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She is a first-rate technologist, as is typified by her passion and work.
Pluto TV provides free streaming television service to millions of viewers each month in America and Europe. Via its partnership with major TV networks, movie studios, publishers, and digital media companies, Pluto TV is delivering 200+ live and original channels and thousands of on-demand movies to its ever-growing audience.
Omotayo’s team builds products that are used internally to curate or program videos, on-demand content, and channels, ingest content from Pluto TV’s partners and ensure quality control in what is shared with users.
Wielding Remote Work
As an engineer working from Lagos whose work serves millions of people half a world away, Omotayo, like all of Andela’s software engineers, is a remote hero. As part of a distributed team spread across multiple timezones, timely communication and feedback are cornerstones of her work process, to ensure that expectations are met.
“We typically work in 2-week sprints on my team, in which each engineer is assigned 2 or more tasks depending on the complexity. Our tasks are generated based on feature requests from our users and the company road map, there are often bug fixes and spikes for every sprint too.”
How She Works:
Working on a product that millions of people use demands that efficient processes and structures are put in place. Top software engineers have a method to their work, which helps them deliver their best in every scenario.
“When working on a new task, I often plan my approach to the problem by writing out a to-do list in my editor and then list expand on what must be done to complete the list. During this process, I often learn about or experiment with new approaches and I finally implement the most efficient. I often reach out to my team members or colleagues if I feel stuck or need a second opinion on my tasks. On really challenging tasks, I try to do a personal retrospective just to ensure that what I learned during the process stays with me.”
Pluto TV is available on all mobile, web and connected TV streaming devices, and it’s a top free app used by millions of viewers each month to watch premium news, TV shows, movies, sports, lifestyle, and trending digital series. Optimization feature requests are quite common for Omotayo’s team and it is their job to ensure that users have a great experience using the product, regardless of the device they use or where they are within the regions that Pluto TV serves.
The post Giving Free On-demand Access To Millions Takes Some Doing appeared first on Andela.