Today’s consumers are more engaged with streaming media than ever before. Akamai provides streaming media services with technology solutions geared toward optimizing the workflows of their video engineering departments.

Tedd Smith, a solutions engineer here at Akamai, works as part of our direct-to-consumer group to support our largest media-streaming clients. He enables developer success by crafting solutions to their challenges, resulting in end users everywhere experiencing higher-quality media streaming.

I sat down with Tedd to talk about his role as a solutions engineer, today’s streaming media landscape, and his journey to Akamai. Here are some highlights from my conversation with this programmer-turned-developer-experience expert.

Taking the reins of an exciting new position

Having grown up as a natural tinkerer, Tedd jumped at the opportunity to take a C++ programming class during his junior year of high school. After successfully writing his first “Hello, world!” statement, Tedd was hooked. He knew then that he wanted to study computer science as an undergraduate.

Prior to a six-year tenure at Akamai, Tedd worked as a full-stack developer at a linguistics translation firm. After several people at the firm left to join Akamai, Tedd did some reflecting and became curious enough to join them.

There was just one problem: Akamai had no development roles open to him at the time. Tedd had to make a choice.

“I started talking to someone from the sales organization about a technical sales role,” Tedd said. “There was much less coding involved, but I thought, ‘You know what? I’ll try it for a year. If it doesn't work out, I’ll go back to coding.’ It didn’t take long before I got the bug and I realized this was the place to be.”

Making the change to solutions development

Tedd was a web developer before joining Akamai, where he transitioned into a junior solutions engineer role, then quickly worked his way up to a lead position by developing high-quality solutions to our streaming clients’ problems. 

Developers have approached him and his team with questions and concerns about a code sample or API, and Tedd has leveraged his decades of programming experience to devise tailored solutions. 

If he doesn’t immediately have an answer, Tedd treats it as an opportunity to dig through legacy codebases, both proprietary and publicly hosted, to learn something new. He and his team then craft solutions that overcome the developers’ challenges, while also making more general examples available to benefit others in our community.

Striving for success at scale 

Where others may look at a problem and think it unsolvable, Tedd sees a challenge. “I'll always have this gut feeling where I'm like, ‘No, I'm pretty sure I can make this work somehow,’" explained Tedd. 

Once a solution has been prepared, Tedd then proposes it to the customer. He’ll reveal the benefits of implementing the direct-to-consumer group’s distinct approach, and fill any holes the developer might try to poke. 

Just like the solution itself, Tedd’s delivery process consistently conforms to the developer’s individual needs.

“I can be handing off documentation, and just fielding questions,” explained Tedd. “Or I can be giving a demo of something that I wrote using Akamai tools to prove that, ‘Hey, here's how much time and energy this could save you if you went this route.’"

Unpacking the streaming media landscape

Modern streaming technologies deliver large video files like movies and TV episodes into multiple small segments through a technique called segmented streaming, otherwise known as adapted bitrate streaming. 

Content provider databases possess multiple versions of each video segment of whatever the consumer is watching, each at a different resolution. These video fragments are loaded on the fly according to the end user’s immediate internet connection quality. 

Akamai’s content delivery technology enables this smarter, more efficient streaming approach to provide end users with a premium viewing experience — no matter what service they’re watching. 

“If all of a sudden you have a drop in throughput on your internet, we can say, “You know what? Hey, let's actually grab a lower-resolution version of this video for the next few segments to keep it from having to re-buffer,” explained Tedd. “Then, we can bump back up to the high-quality version once your connection is good again."

Of course, video engineers at our media clients are constantly looking to leverage our technology in new ways to improve their product offerings, which can mean overcoming new technical hurdles as they arise. In this way, Tedd’s collaborative efforts with developers as a solutions engineer have directly improved streaming capabilities for millions of viewers.

“I feel like that's what's so cool about what I get to do…. very often I’ll walk into a completely greenfield situation where we have a customer saying, ‘Hey, we've got this very manual workflow and we want to optimize it and offload as many cycles as we can so our engineers can build cool new stuff,’” Tedd said.

Recognizing the direct-to-consumer team’s ambition

Going forward, Tedd has plans to expand the scope of who Akamai’s solutions can benefit. In particular, he notes how a variety of the projects his team has worked on didn’t make their way out to the broader developer community. 

“Anytime we can take those small snippets and package them up for consumption by a larger audience, I feel like that’s when this is really going to take off,” explains Tedd.

He believes that by engaging a more rigorous content creation approach we can illuminate the details of a given solution for more customers. “As opposed to, ‘Hey, here's a piece of documentation about what you want to do,’ instead it’s, ‘Hey, here's a video that I just spun up of me writing this code and walking through how it works,’” explained Tedd.

Tedd believes this will help his team deliver better, more instructive content that’s easier to distribute throughout a client’s organization — while setting the stage for the team to tackle new challenges.

Looking ahead to the future of Akamai

Beyond his work as a solutions engineer, Tedd is part of Akamai’s Developer Champions program. This progressive internal group embodies Akamai’s values and culture to deliver better customer experiences by enabling our larger developer community.

“I found a home in this program with a whole bunch of other people who are just pushing the limits,” said Tedd. “It's the drive that I need to keep pushing this forward as much as I can.”

Learn more

Interested in watching the full interview? Find this episode of The Developer’s Edge on our YouTube channel.