Next slide please, A brief history of the corporate presentation, Two Person Teams, Why Twitter Didn’t Go Down, From a Real Twitter SRE
The sound of slides clacking is deafening. But it doesn’t matter, because the champagne is flowing and the sound system is loud. The 2,500 dignitaries and VIPs in the audience are being treated to an hourlong operetta about luxury travel. Onstage, a massive chorus, the entire Stockholm Philharmonic, and some 50 dancers and performers are fluttering around a pair of Saab 9000CD sedans. Stunning images of chrome details, leather seats, and open roads dance across a 26-foot-tall screen behind them. The images here are all analog: nearly 7,000 film slides, carefully arranged in a grid of 80 Kodak projectors. It’s 1987, and slideshows will never get any bigger than this.
Before PowerPoint, and long before digital projectors, 35-millimeter film slides were king. Bigger, clearer, and less expensive to produce than 16-millimeter film, and more colorful and higher-resolution than video, slides were the only medium for the kinds of high-impact presentations given by CEOs and top brass at annual meetings for stockholders, employees, and salespeople. Known in the business as “multi-image” shows, these presentations required a small army of producers, photographers, and live production staff to pull off. First the entire show had to be written, storyboarded, and scored. Images were selected from a library, photo shoots arranged, animations and special effects produced. A white-gloved technician developed, mounted, and dusted each slide before dropping it into the carousel. Thousands of cues were programmed into the show control computers—then tested, and tested again. Because computers crash. Projector bulbs burn out. Slide carousels get jammed.
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At this scale, PowerPoint’s impact on how the world communicates has been immeasurable. But here’s something that can be measured: Microsoft grew tenfold in the years that Robert Gaskins ran its Graphics Business Unit, and it has grown 15-fold since.
Un peu d’histoire sur un des outils centraux de la comédie professionnelle : les slide shows. Et comprend d’autant plus ce que fait le mot show là dedans avec cet article. L’histoire est moyennement longue mais se lit très facilement.
(03:49): We do not have sort of a, we used to call it the, the Photoshop wall now, I guess it’s the Figma wall where you throw Figma files around and then someone has to cut that up and turn it into the actual code. No, the designers at 37signals go, if not straight to HTML, then very quickly to HTML and not just to HTML, but to JavaScript and even a bit of Ruby. You’re working in the same code base. There’s not a translation layer. Not only is there not, um, sort of a human translation layer, there’s not a technical translation layer either cutting all those translation layers out and getting the most direct bandwidth between two people. I don’t think people realize how big of a difference it makes. In fact, um, we had a funny incident a few months ago, I think it was where we were, was it five programmers on Basecamp?
(04:44): And we were like, it’s too many. It’s too many. We can’t actually do product management for Basecamp with five teams at the same time. We cut that down to three teams. So we’d have three programmers at that time working on Basecamp at any one time with three other, uh, programmers. And that was it. That was all we needed. I talked to startups all the time who think they need 5, 7, 10 programmers to do anything at all. And when I tell 'em, Hey, do you know what Basecamp, the thing that’s like paying for 37 signals has been pushing this whole company forward for 20 years. It consists of like three teams of two. Like they blow their minds. And this is what is odd to me, is we have shared everything about how we built. We share our tools, we share Ruby on Rails, we share our process, we share Shape Up, we share every single approach how we run this company.
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Encore 37signals qui sort du lot. Et pour avoir testé quelque chose de similaire en taille/fonctionnement, ça peut effectivement aller très vite. Le pré-requis c’est la responsabilité / autonomie sur les décisions, ce qui implique aussi que la vision et les principes directeurs métiers et techniques soient partagés et compris.Oui, d’un coup ça réduit le nombre de contextes dans lesquels c’est possible.
Twitter supposedly lost around 80% of its work force. What ever the real number is, there are whole teams with out engineers on it now. Yet, the website goes on and the tweets keep coming. This left a lot wondering what exactly was going on with all those engineers and made it seem like it was all just bloat. I’d like to explain my little corner of Twitter (though it wasn’t so little) and some of the work that went on that kept this thing running.
Un vieil article que je n’avais pas vu passer, qui donne une partie de l’histoire, celle de la Cache Team, sur les raisons pour lesquelles Twitter tient encore après avoir perdu bon nombre de ses ingénieurs.
