The Night My Name Rolled in the Credits

I once did some work for an entertainment TV show.

My usual job is completely backstage. When the system runs normally, users don’t notice it. In fact, not being noticed is what counts as success in my world.

But that one job was a little different.

Late at night. The show ends, and the credits start rolling.

Cast, director, production company, ADs. And somewhere in that list — my name.

“Oh. There it is.”

That was it. But I remember it felt strangely good.

I’m not an actor, not a celebrity. Just an engineer who built a voting system.

Still, having your name appear on a nationally broadcast screen is, frankly, a pretty nice feeling.

Building a voting system out of viewer emails

What I was working on back then was a system that used emails from viewers to vote for girls trying to become pop idols.

This was not the era of “liking” things on social media. Viewers sent emails to the show. The intensity of those emails came flying straight at our servers.

Once the broadcast started, traffic spiked instantly.

Massive volume of emails per second. The server load graph suddenly went wild.

But that moment was fun.

“Hold on, hold on… okay, we handled it.”

Watching logs in the middle of the night, getting hyped over that kind of thing.

And of course, viewers don’t all vote honestly.

The same person blasts the same vote over and over. Some behavior is clearly scripted. Unnatural submission intervals, suspicious IPs, mechanical patterns.

You dig into the logs, judge “yeah, this is automated,” and block it.

It wasn’t righteousness, really. It was just fun, like a strategy game.

“Ah, so this is the bypass you came up with.”

It felt like a battle of wits against strangers I’d never meet.

Entertainment is its own world

That said, the entertainment industry really is its own thing.

When I looked at the master data for the girls’ profiles — supposedly an “amateur participation” project — talent agency names were neatly listed next to the entries.

“Wait, what?”

And then later, requests like this would come in:

“Could you make it possible to tweak the rankings a bit?”

In other words, a feature to manually change the order.

At first I laughed.

“So what was the point of all that anti-fraud work I did?”

But after a while, you come to understand that this is just how it is.

Entertainment isn’t necessarily a job of showing “reality as it is.” At the end of the day, you’re making a production.

Of course, as an engineer, I’d push back with the right arguments. I’d explain log consistency, talk about the necessity of fraud prevention.

But in the end:

“Okay, I’ll build it with this kind of spec for staging purposes.”

And I’d just implement it.

That kind of pragmatic resignation — I didn’t hate it.

I think, internally, I had drawn a line: “This isn’t a financial system.”

Some of this would, of course, get torched on social media today. Call it the dark side of the entertainment industry if you want.

But that adrenaline was something else

But fighting massive emails on the back end, supporting a live broadcast, and then — at the end — seeing your own name roll in the credits.

That kind of thrill was hard to come by in normal enterprise system development.

If it were every job, it’d be a problem. But once every three years or so, having that kind of “festival-style development” — I think it’s fine.