Unwinding a Decade of Assumptions - Architecting New Experiences

How are you thinking about legacy? As engineers, we look at systems or code that haven’t changed in years, and imagine what we would do today. However, we often neglect the hearts and minds behind them, and how those need to change too. The price of innovation is an evergreen race between technical debt and optimization. At Netflix, our teams are always evaluating the tradeoffs, and making decisions that help us pay off technical debt as we innovate. This flexibility gives us the freedom to deliver excellent products in the short term, while strategizing how to sustain our systems and microservices in the long term. Netflix’s legacy is a story of reinventing itself, and how we delight the world by building new experiences.

In this talk, I’ll share about how we’ve plumbed new experiences across dozens of Netflix microservices. You’ll hear about how we navigate assumptions, from ideation to delivery, and how those assumptions impact our decision making. You’ll hear stories of the joys and trials in reinventing Netflix, what we learned, and how our teams are thinking about the next decade.