Paul Oliver is Lead Software Developer for Studiocode, a joint venture between Hudl and Nelnet in Lincoln, Nebraska. Oliver will be presenting on microservices at AIM Infotec on March 21st. SPN caught up with Oliver over phone.

SPN: For readers who aren’t familiar with Studiocode, describe what you do there.

PO: A while back Hudl bought a company in Australia called Sportstec. It took video from sports and allowed you to tag the video so you could quickly recall video clips without having to replay the whole video. But another interesting use case for this software is that it can be used by medical professionals, teaching hospitals, researchers—anyone doing video analytics. So Studiocode is that part of it. Hudl took the sports side, and Nelnet took over everything that is not sports.

So Studiocode is basically Hudl for doctors and nurses and researchers. It’s much broader than that, but that’s the quickest way [to explain it]. We already have existing customers. There’s about 3,200 customers already using it on Mac, but we’re moving the technology into the cloud.

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SPN: So this is a product already being used, the company has been around a while, but your work on it is pretty new, right?

PO: Right. We just started writing code for this a month ago. It’s in the early stages.

SPN: What were you doing before Studiocode?

PO: I was working at a startup called Idea5 in Omaha. I was leading a team of 5-6 developers, and we were working with Microsoft Azure, putting in a lot of business intelligence logic into Azure so [users] could build charts on demand out of a buffet of about 13,000 statistics. In the process what I learned was how to build things in the cloud, how to do continuous delivery better. I also learned the importance of really pushing the boundaries of what a cloud can do.

SPN: Has it been a big shift for you going from Idea5 in the financial industry to doing video analytics with Studiocode?

PO: I would say 85% of the lessons I’ve learned at Idea5 I’ve been able to bring over here. What’s been different is the scale I get to work with. We’re basically using Hudl’s source code. I’ve been through all the Hudl onboarding, so I’ve had a chance to see the operation and scale that Hudl has and apply that to a new problem.

When I was at Idea5 we were happy to have 10 people a day using our system. I heard a recent statistic that Hudl processes 52,000 basketball videos a week. That is impressive. They are one of the biggest users of Amazon’s cloud service.

It’s really fun to pick the brains of the operations team at Hudl, see how they solve these problems, and then take these tool sets and apply them to the medical field. It gets me all excited, I want to do back-flips.

SPN: What will you be talking about at Infotec?

PO: My talk is called “What’s the big deal with microservices?” and I’m going to talk about why microservices are growing in popularity, what advantages they have over alternatives, and then I want to talk about common uses for microservices and what problems people don’t expect. Lastly, I’m going to talk about how to get ready to do microservices in your organization. It’s for people who have thought about using microservices in the past but aren’t sure where to go next. I want to help people make that decision. I also want to teach people how to beatbox.

SPN: Is there one tip you can share on how to beatbox?

PO: (laughs) Yeah, start by saying, “boots, cuts, boots, cuts.” And then take the vowels out. That’s the first introductory level, then it gets more fun and advanced from there.

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Ryan Pendell is the Managing Editor of Silicon Prairie News.