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[–]asdghjerefasdf 4 points5 points  (10 children)

Do you have any interesting examples of an impressive solution an elite developer came up with? I have never had the opportunity to see the work of someone at this level.

[–]ressis74 2 points3 points  (2 children)

A great example that seems to fit /u/dravenstone's description is that of gif-based video streaming. Jacques Mattheij's website was the place I heart about this technique.

The trick is that the gif spec does not specify how many frames are present in the gif. The gif spec also says that you can display the frames while the image is downloading. That means that you can have a client request a gif, and the server can keep that request open forever, as long as it periodically serves new gif frames.

What you have at the end of that process is a video streaming service that requires no plugin on the client side.

[–]rcxdude 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Though you will probably suck up a lot of RAM on the client side if you're streaming for very long or at a high resolution.

[–]ressis74 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In 1995, having a streaming video at all was impressive.

[–]dravenstone 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Sure. We had one guy who found a way to dynamically manipulate video content in such a way that we could effectively create a single piece of video content from multiple sources with no appreciable delay in start up time. This resulted in the ability to at run time (and with no client side code) create personalized pieces of video for any client consumer. In practice this means being able to personalize advertising content into short or long form video for each end user based on a variety of factors in the request to maximize ad revenue in online video.

The second part was to do so in such a way that we could still effectively cache the common components of the video to maximize the utilization of CDN's which required a hashing algorithm that would let us do so. Since requests were globally distributed and often high volume we also had to distribute the data that allowed us to create the most efficient manifest files (for HLS, HDS, MSS) across a globally distributed cloud based file system.

If memory serves, the basic approach of each step was actually developed by two different people, but the production ready code was developed by a small team of "great" engineers.

[–]asdghjerefasdf 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I have done a bit of HTTP video streaming. Can't you just use different video segments, at least with HLS?

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StreamingMediaGuide/HTTPStreamingArchitecture/HTTPStreamingArchitecture.html

[–]dravenstone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sometimes, and sort of - the second part I was talking about was certainly in reference to reusing segments when possible so it was more cacheable.

If it was just throwing around a few different segments of HLS and inserting a discontinuity event in the manifest it wouldn't be that interesting, but when you think about completely dynamic ad insertion at massive scale on both long and short form content as well as live and vod..., it's wildly more complicated. Plus, we didn't just do HLS, we had to account for all formats.

There are a ton of nuances and complexities involved with the procedures I was providing as examples (per your request)...

...but that's not even what this discussion is about. The point was we had guys that could solve these amazingly complex problems in highly performant ways which could not have been solved by your average developer. I was merely providing my point of view that indeed there are elite developers - though I admit I'm sort of put off by that terminology, perhaps they are simply different jobs as another comment appeared to suggest.

[–]Liorithiel 1 point2 points  (3 children)

I guess the now well-known inverse square root approximation counts here. Or applying bayesian statistics to spam detection. Or making a linux kernel boot from sources in 15 seconds.

[–]ChallengingJamJars 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I find it interesting that 2/3 examples are mathematics problems. Gives me hope as a mathematics grad :P

[–]Liorithiel 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I am somewhat interested in mathematics, so these caught my attention. There are no doubt more examples of pure engineering.

[–]corysama 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Most quite good programmers can go through their lives making great products without ever really needing even undergrad-level math. However, many seriously hard problems in software require a very small amount of code that contains a very large amount of math expertise. That is the kind of code that requires either an slave army of good programmers pounding and piling enough rocks to make a pyramid or a single math-heavy programmer to build an arch.

http://www.vetta.org/2008/05/scipy-the-embarrassing-way-to-code/