jr conlin's ink stained banana

As a new Netflix employee, i got the chance to take the Distribution Center Tour. It's an hour affair where we gawk in amazement at how incredibly efficient the folks working there are. It's not all robots and super cooled linear accelerators, which i find oddly comforting. Naturally, i'm not going into details about how things work, but here are a few answers to questions you probably didn't have.

• You have no idea how many movies they have. No, really. No idea. In fact, here's a tiny fraction of them.
• It doesn't matter if the barcode shows up in the return envelope window. (It's used on the way out.)
• That sleeve the movie is in? REEEEEEEAALLLY important.
• Yes, they really do read those notes you put in with the movies, but keep 'em short. Most of the folks there only get 1/8th of a second to read them. If you want to be creative, leave a review on the site.
• When you purchase a DVD, they have to rebuild the box.
• One of the biggest hurdles is simple physics. Light simply travels only so fast.

See, this is scale done right. You have no idea what all is involved in maintaining that flow of disks nor do you really care. It's magic to you because it simply works. Yeah, if you're watching a movie every night, (Or "watching" as i know some folks do.) then things kinda slow down for you. To see things in operation, though, you start to understand why. In order to make things fair for everyone, adding a few artificial governors makes a lot of sense. Back off the spigot a little, pace your viewing and the system will handle it just fine. You're just one of the elements that needs to be scaled against. It's funny how the companies that absolutely get scale right are the ones you never think have a scaling problem.