Sometimes you need a speedboat, sometimes a container-ship.
tl;dr revisiting some old thoughts from/with friends on the value of making some things fast, some things slow
As I’m entering my third week at White October we’ve just landed an interesting project (whoop!) which includes one of my favourite things: a disposable rapid prototyped thinking object. Something that will never reach production, but is there to help think through a product. It’s a very different sort of thing to the sort of things which the organisation normally makes. It’s one of those things that Simon Willison’s “law” describes:
I love this phrase. It’s rolled around my head so many times since he said it in 2009. We were launching The Guardian’s Open Platform and he’d recently built the MPs Expenses crowd sourcing application. Each hackday we had at The Guardian gave everyone a feeling of experimentation and making fun things fast, some of which provoked interesting follow up products. There was an interesting sense that we had lots of programmatic LEGO blocks around which were different to what had been around before, but were now mature — Appengine, S3, EC2, JQuery, Yahoo Query Language, Freebase, APIs from Flickr, Twitter et al. You could remix things together in a whole new way to make fast things, quick disposable things which you could switch on, scale like crazy and then just leave running at minimal cost to not break the URLs on the web. Simon calculated that MPs Expenses cost just £50 in Amazon costs.
Dan Catt and Meg Pickard built Zeitgeist, a “”small pieces loosely joined thing” of wonder that picked out articles trending out of normal trajectories and gave you a new view on the newspaper, the hidden gems, algorithmic crate digging. Michael Brunton Spall and others made a way of people giving their live sentiment about a leader’s debate taking over 2.7 million requests in 2 hours. Stephen Abbott and I built a thing at a hackday that used Appengine’s task queues to fan out queries of the Twitter API to allow us to pull in whitelisted tweets about events like the Edinburgh Festival into the newspaper, “weaving in” in Matt McAllister’s excellent parlance. To top it all Daniel Vydra made the Random Guardian in an hour after a flippant remark about “Chatroulette for News”. We were touched when Google asked us for a guest blog about our experiments. Twitter asked us to come up with prototypes for it’s @anywhere launch.
At the time we were asked to give talks on what we were doing. The canonical one was “Building the Stacks for a Mutualised Newspaper” which I’m gobsmacked has been viewed fourteen thousand times on Slideshare. We gave this at a Gartner symposium one week and at Future of Web Apps about a week later. It’s fascinating to read through it again. The thing that stands out still is the concept that not everything needs to be built to the same quality or at the same pace.
We thought for a long while about how to describe the difference between things which needed to be slow and sure and precise (the CMS) and things which needed to be fast. One had a huge risk of breaking mission critical things if you got it wrong, the other had the huge risk of being built so slowly that a breaking news opportunity was missed or the cost was too high for the duration the application was needed. Eventually we called the slow one a container ship and the fast one a speedboat. Both are useful, both have their place. The thing which enabled speedboats was cheap disposable compute resources, APIs and code to consume the APIs quickly and reliably.
Tomorrow we start building a little speedboat prototype. We’ll start by defining the APIs, filling the returns with dummy data and throwing them up on some disposable resource. Maybe on Kubernetes on Compute Engine, Docker on somewhere, maybe in Node on Heroku or the old favourite Appengine. From that we can make a client quickly with JQuery and something like the Google Charts API to put a graph on it. Nothing fancy. Nothing permanent.
Just a sketch. All in the time, hopefully, it would take to have the meeting to describe it.
