Film2Home – Fullstack Developer

Context

Film2Home was a Video-on-Demand company and a subsidiary of Bonver. After Film2Home went bankrupt it was acquired by Magine TV, which kept running the platform under both the Film2Home and Plejmo brands.

From 2014 to 2017 I worked on these services as a fullstack developer and also did the DevOps work. The platform was ASP.NET MVC applications with EPiServer for content, plus backend services for catalog, payments, user accounts and content metadata.

Problem

A traditional n-tier architecture that struggled under load
Manual deployments that took about an hour and were error-prone
Third-party integrations for payments and metadata that were getting harder to manage
No API for the new clients that were on the way

Approach

Architecture

Introduced CQRS to separate reads from writes
Moved parts of the system to a service bus architecture on Azure Service Bus
Moved third-party integrations into separate services

Backend development

Built and maintained ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API applications with C#, NHibernate and SQL Server
Designed and implemented version 1 of Plejmo's REST API
Built a gamification proof of concept (levels and achievements) on top of the service bus

Frontend development

Built UI features in JavaScript, jQuery and KnockoutJS
Worked with the designers and editors using EPiServer

System integration

Built and maintained integrations with metadata and payment providers
Built REST and WCF services for internal and external consumers

Automation & DevOps

Set up automated builds and deployments with Octopus Deploy
Managed IIS configuration across environments

Results

Deployment time went from about an hour to under two minutes, with virtually no deployment errors
Better performance under load after moving from n-tier to the service bus architecture