My Work At Stan
Over Four Years, Building Australia's Streaming Platform
For the past four years, I've been part of the six person CTV team behind Stan, Australia's largest homegrown streaming service.
I maintain the core TV app running on 175+ platforms serving 1.6M+ users across smart TVs, game consoles, and set top boxes.
From the 2024 Olympics to daily binge watching, every stream on TV runs through code I've written.
Open Source, Awards, and Big Wins
Three of my fixes ship in Google's Shaka Player. All three started the same way: something felt slow on a TV that came out a decade ago.
First was the HLS parser, redoing the same work on every segment. Lifting it out of the loop took manifest parsing from roughly 1600ms to 400ms. That one won the Nine Digital Annual Award for "No Stone Left Unturned", one of only four given each year.
The second was quieter. Shaka built a fresh error object on every abortable operation whether anything had gone wrong or not, and building an error means building a stack trace. That is not free. Deleting work that never needed doing shortened garbage collection pauses on old webviews.
The third was a leak. XHR handlers kept hold of their requests and response buffers long after the request finished, and the collectors in Chrome 38 era browsers never worked it out. Releasing them took the listener count from 306 to 36 over a minute of playback.
Closer to home, I lead device performance initiatives. One brought 2015+ legacy devices onto the latest app version and grew platform coverage by 30%, and two more are in flight right now. And during the 2024 Olympics I rebuilt core navigation, steadied the app, and improved analytics and reporting under the highest traffic event of our year.
The Tech Stack
Built with React, TypeScript, and Redux running across Tizen, WebOS, WebMAF and dozens of other platforms.
Webpack handles the heavy lifting for 175+ device configurations each with unique quirks and limitations. Targeting devices all the way down to Chrome 38 and Safari 7.
I've built custom internal tooling around native tooling gaps, creating a unified dev experience across every platform.
It's the kind of infrastructure work that doesn't ship features but makes shipping features possible.
Systems, Tools, and Architecture
I help drive the architecture behind 175+ platforms, and build the foundational libraries that these platforms rely on.
Design system, analytics, player bugs, performance, platform quirks: if it lands on constrained TV hardware, it lands on me. I refactored our monolithic codebase into a modular, testable monorepo and designed cross device testing pipelines that unblocked QA.
From remote logging and debugging tools to custom runtimes, I build the tooling that keeps a multi platform app stable and devs happy.
Optimisations at Scale
My performance work goes deep into ancient browsers and hardware limits. Every fix is backed by profiling data, not guesswork.
Some of my work includes diagnosing and eliminating redundant React renders, optimising garbage collection (yep), forcing hardware decoding and batching network requests between user interactions to name a few.
By engineering custom GPU optimised animation hooks that devs adhere to, I stopped layout thrashing animations getting into production and ensured smooth UI across even the oldest of platforms.
Team Culture
Lifting the standard around me is part of the work, not a side project.
I actively mentor junior developers, host organisation wide tech talks and represent our platform's hardware constraints in Stan's internal design system teams.
Championing a strong team culture helped us take home the award for Best Teamwork at Nine Digital's annual hackathon.