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Scott Kidder

Scott Kidder

Sr. Engineering Manager

10 years of video experience. Previously solved hard problems at Brightcove.

Written by Scott:
A design showing a green bar chart that continues to grow up and to the right

Published on July 6, 2023 (9 months ago)

Scaling data processing with an embedded key-value store: insights from our migration to BadgerDB

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder13 min readEngineering

Learn how Mux migrated from a shared, distributed Riak key-value (KV) store to the BadgerDB embedded KV store and the massive benefits it brought us.

Published on September 7, 2021 (over 2 years ago)

5 years of Flink at Mux

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder11 min readEngineering

Read how Mux has used Flink over the course of 5 years, lessons learned, and future improvements.

Published on April 20, 2021 (almost 3 years ago)

Be the MVP of your live stream: Lessons learned from monitoring the Big Game

Scott Kidder
Justin Sanford
By Scott and Justin10 min readEngineering

Maybe you’re not planning an event with millions of concurrent viewers, but our takeaways from monitoring one of the biggest sporting events of the year are applicable to live streams of all sizes.

Keyboard synthesizer with patch cables

Published on December 16, 2020 (over 3 years ago)

Kafka Connect: The Magic Behind Mux Data Realtime Exports

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder12 min readEngineering

Kafka Connect is a powerful tool for moving data in and out of Apache Kafka clusters. Learn how Mux uses Kafka Connect to power real-time exports, as well as lessons we've developed along the way.

1964 World's Fair vision of weather monitoring in the future

Published on July 1, 2020 (over 3 years ago)

Why You Should Use a CDN for Video

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder8 min readVideo education

Online video consumption is accelerating rapidly, and video Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have been instrumental in sustaining this growth.

Stateful Stream Processing with Kafka and Go

Published on October 3, 2019 (over 4 years ago)

Stateful Stream Processing with Kafka and Go

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder14 min readEngineering

Mux uses Kafka and Go to perform stateful processing of millions of video views each day. Learn how we approach handling Kafka streams in Golang at scale.

How Mux Routed Around a Major Network Outage

Published on July 22, 2019 (over 4 years ago)

How Mux Routed Around a Major Network Outage

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder4 min readCompany

Learn how Mux Video performed during the Verizon BGP networking incident, and how dynamic CDN selection can help reduce the impact of network outages.

When Good Certificates Go Bad: Monitoring for Expired TLS Certificates

Published on May 16, 2019 (almost 5 years ago)

When Good Certificates Go Bad: Monitoring for Expired TLS Certificates

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder7 min readEngineering

TLS certificates are essential to commerce, privacy, and trust on the Internet. Learn about the open-source TLS certificate expiry monitoring tool from Mux.

Multi-CDN support in Mux Video for improved performance and reliability

Published on February 12, 2019 (about 5 years ago)

Multi-CDN support in Mux Video for improved performance and reliability

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder10 min readEngineering

See why you should care about CDNs and how Mux Video automatically leverages multiple CDNs to deliver the best network performance and viewing experience.

Video Access Log Processing with Apache Flink

Published on October 24, 2018 (over 5 years ago)

Video Access Log Processing with Apache Flink

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder9 min readEngineering

This is an overview of the stream-processing system built by Mux to handle large volumes of video-streaming logs with Apache Flink and Kafka.

Securing Video Content with Signed URLs

Published on May 10, 2018 (almost 6 years ago)

Securing Video Content with Signed URLs

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder7 min readProduct

“Our video streams have been hacked.” That was the rumour floating around the office of my past employer in February 2008. I was a software engineer working on the video encoding pipeline for a mobile...

Using Percentiles To Identify Outliers and the Typical Experience

Published on December 22, 2017 (over 6 years ago)

Using Percentiles To Identify Outliers and the Typical Experience

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder6 min readEngineering

The most overused measurement is the arithmetic mean (average). In nearly all cases you're better served by using percentiles instead of averages.

Published on August 21, 2017 (over 6 years ago)

Improvements to Error-Rate Alerting

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder2 min readProduct

In January 2017 Mux announced support for error-rate alerts in our analytics service. Learn about improvements to alert actionability and visibility.

android graffiti

Published on June 27, 2017 (almost 7 years ago)

Do Androids Watch Videos of Electric Sheep? How Bots React to Web Video

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder12 min readVideo news

Philip K. Dick’s classic science-fiction story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” confronted mankind's need to differentiate living things and machines. While it’s currently easy for us to make thi...

Notes from Flink Forward San Francisco 2017

Published on May 5, 2017 (almost 7 years ago)

Notes from Flink Forward San Francisco 2017

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder6 min readEvents

Highlights from the FlinkForward San Francisco 2017 conference by Scott Kidder from Mux.

Mux at Flink Forward SF 2017

Published on March 21, 2017 (about 7 years ago)

Mux at Flink Forward SF 2017

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder0 min readEvents

Mux will be attending the Flink Forward SF conference on April 11, 2017 at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco. Scott Kidder from Mux will be speaking at Flink Forward on our Flink-powered real-time ano...

Using Control Streams to Manage Apache Flink Applications

Published on March 7, 2017 (about 7 years ago)

Using Control Streams to Manage Apache Flink Applications

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder6 min readEngineering

Learn how Mux has used control streams to manage Apache Flink applications with zero-downtime.

Discovering Anomalies in Real-Time with Apache Flink

Published on February 15, 2017 (about 7 years ago)

Discovering Anomalies in Real-Time with Apache Flink

Scott Kidder
By Scott Kidder7 min readEngineering

Mux receives a continuous stream of video-view event data, every second of every day. Some of these views indicate errors during the delivery or playback of video. How can we detect error spikes in rea...