Roku Takeover in Manchester

We are here again this time @ Roku TV in Manchester to explore their engineering culture.

Agenda (timings are approximate)
18:00 Welcome networking, drinks
18:15 Intro to Roku: Paul Kim/Anish Shah/Steven Keng
18:30 Timothy Huertas: Taming Roku’s Web Component Library
18:50 Cefn Hoile: Watchable.dev – A Minimal Watchable Store
19:10 Refreshments, drinks, pizza
19:20 Filipe Ferreira: Sorry-cypress: Parallelising Cypress Tests in CI/CD
19:40 Kornel Martyin: Techniques for Optimising React Rendering Perf
20:00 Discussions and close

Paul Kim - Director of Engineering
Paul joined Roku in 2014 when the company was just getting into the TV space and the company's website was running on 3 different tech stacks and 4 separate service providers. Originally focused on promotions and ecommerce for roku.com, he grew the Web Engineering team's responsibilities grew to encompass the support platform, developer portal, content tooling, user merchandising, device linking/activation, account creation, A/B experiment testing platform, internationalization/localization tooling, The Roku Channel off-platform and Roku's Photo Streams OS app, web services and customer portal.

Anish Shah - Engineering Manager
Anish joined Roku in 2016 and helped spearhead the Customer Care Engineering team building best-in-class products for consumers, 2nd party Roku call center staff as well as Roku internal users. Today, Anish leads 3 distinct product teams at Roku: Account Growth Marketing Engineering, Customer Care Engineering and Web IOT Engineering. His teams help build experiences for roku.com and many of its sister properties including support.roku.com, advertising.roku.com, newsroom.roku.com, roku.com/blog, roku.com/investor, and many more. Anish also manages internal tools and 2nd party call center tools for helping Roku level 3 staff and customer service agents troubleshoot issues for Roku customers. He is always looking to build the best experiences for all audiences using the best-in-class technology and teams.

Steven Keng - Senior Engineering Manager
Steven loves building the newest and coolest products from scratch and delivering application frameworks, design systems, component pattern libraries, localization, content infra, and generic building blocks to power hundred of autonomous web applications, services, and teams. He joined Roku in 2014 after spending years in AOL, Chegg, and his own startup Myweboo. Modernized and evolved Roku's web tech stack from .Net and Drupal to NodeJs, React, Material UI, and many other modern technologies. In addition, he's got his hands dirty building consumer experiences, instant signup, web channel store, Roku user merchandising, and many more products.
Timothy Huertas
Tim jokes he started building single page apps before Ajax was Ajax; back when the only browser with an asynchronous HTTP request/response object was IE 5.5. Tim has an affinity for the front end, but has worked up and down the stack and is an advocate for pragmatic automated regression.

Cefn Hoile
Cefn has spent decades sculpting open source hardware and software, and helping others do the same. Full Stack Devops at the BBC, Snyk and Roku have catalyzed a passion for legible software frameworks, helping engineers to thrive with minimum magic. Loves: strict-typing, inspiring docs, just-enough testing. Cefn balances his work with his life single-parenting, sailing and flying paragliders.

Filipe Ferreira
A talented software engineer who's a force to be reckoned with in the world of coding! His skills in developing high-performance, scalable applications for web and mobile platforms are simply mind-blowing! But that's not all - Filipe is also an expert on the latest trends and best practices in software development. He's always on the cutting edge of technology, sharing his insights and experiences with anyone who's willing to learn. Filipe is an avid open source contributor! He's constantly giving back to the community, making significant contributions to a number of popular projects that have helped countless developers around the world.

Kornel Martyin
Kornel has grown up playing PC games and dreaming about eventually being able to make one some day. The first mistake he made on this journey was to find the "Page Source" function on a browser and believing that it was program code that he sees. It is too late for him now, he got stuck with web technologies. Some of his hobbies includes more coding in C++, OpenGL and WebGL, tinkering with mostly digital, electronics, 3D printing and modelling, obviously he's a total nerd, even if he won't admit it. He used to make music but can't find time for it anymore and occasionally also likes to spend a good holiday abroad, exploring the world.