Jam

noun

1. a sweet spread made from fruit and sugar boiled to a thick consistency.

2. an informal gathering; improvising together.

verb (used with object), jammed, jam·ming.

1. make (a broadcast or other electronic signal) unintelligible by causing interference.

Equal parts sweet, creative, and disruptive, each month, the dev team takes one Thursday night out of their busy schedules to stay late at Vimeo HQ, eat some pizza, and dig into some code. The goal is to straight-up hang out and code on ideas that have been floating around in conversation. But sometimes, a few of us use the night to expand on projects we’ve been working on in bits and pieces. The end results are typically small, but marked improvements to site infrastructure — but new features are also born from this time together.

Here’s a snapshot of a few cool code projects the team worked on at our February code jam:

• Justin R, from our video engineering team, created a significant-image-color selector that analyzes an image and selects up to eight significant colors, prioritizing more saturated colors and ignoring very light and very dark ones.

• Paul and Naren combined their application engineering and video engineering strength to work on a new transcoding flow that bypasses the upload servers completely. This project, dubbed “Speeding Ticket,” is still in progress, but will use Dropbox uploads as a test case when it launches. The new flow should speed up the uploading/transcoding process and help reduce the number of Dropbox upload errors.   Eventually, it could be used for other types of uploads as well.

• Joe, a systems admin, converted our transcoding application stack to support docker containers which simplifies the deployment process and allows us to control resource allocation.

• Justin D wielded design magic and made this blog beautiful.

• Our video production powerhouse Andrea took pictures!

Our Code Jams are so legitimately awesome that even non-dev Vimeans are hanging with us, too! Keep checking the Makers blog for updates on future code jams!

When we first launched Vimeo On Demand (our self-distribution platform), we made a lot of assumptions. The design resembled many other movie rental sites at the time, with tons of posters for the viewer to scan and paginate through. It relied very heavily on poster artwork to do all of the selling. Shortly after launch, we realized that this might not be the best approach for VOD.

While most other rental sites can rely on poster artwork, the nature of our direct-from-creator catalog means we need to share additional information about both the title and its creator. In the case of Vimeo On Demand, a poster isn’t quite enough to entice potential viewers. The magic, we discovered, is in the trailer.

We recently redesigned the Vimeo on Demand homepage to focus on ease of discovery. As we began brainstorming ways to evolve our browsing mechanisms, we kept a few simple guidelines in mind:

1. Vimeo On Demand has over 6,000 titles (!), many of which, potential viewers haven’t heard of (yet).

2. Discovery tools should be fun, simple to use, and engaging. Because duh.

3. The trailer is king — king of selling videos, that is.

After throwing a bunch of ideas around, we came up with a solution: Video Cards.

Each video card is simple by nature, containing only a poster, short description, and two actionable buttons. Now, in addition to seeing the eye-catching poster, people looking for something to watch can immerse themselves in a title by reading a description and watching the trailer — all without navigating elsewhere.

We eventually extended the concept for video cards into our hero area — the top section of the On Demand homepage. This allows us to highlight titles without requiring any one-off design assets. Much like the cards, the background is simply a blurred version of the poster overlayed on top of the custom button color, which visually ties everything together.

While we’re still testing what we should surface in these new modules, we think video cards will help you find a thing or two to watch on Vimeo On Demand. But enough design jargon: go scope some vid cards and preview some titles!