Trial engineering moving parts

2. Trial Engineering
Moving Parts
Vishnu Gopal

3. Why?

4. Now that you’ve decided what
product you want to build, it’s
time to test out how to build it.

5. & what’s the best way to build
it in time for the Alpha launch.

6. Note: this target depends on the
“Build a Product Narrative”
target. So take a look at that as
well.

7. So how to trial engineering
moving parts?

8. 1) Identify the difficult problems in the
space.
2) Build a throwaway prototype
to test out options.

9. Example: when I was building
SlideShare, one problem was to
take a PPT file and convert it to
Flash

10. Context: this was way before
HTML5 et. al. so the only way to
show media on the web was
Flash.

11. So the problem was simple:
“Trial out different ways to
convert PPT to Flash”

12. Experiment 1: I knew Openoffice had a
PPT to PDF converter, so I explored ways
to script an Openoffice install to do this
conversion server-side.

13. Experiment 2: I found out a tool
called PDF to SWF to convert
the resulting PDF to a Flash
file.

14. Experiment 3: Exploring
conversions of PPT slides to
images and using a Flash viewer
to display those images.

15. Results?

16. Experiment 1 succeeded: OpenOffice had
a Python scripting bridge so it was easy to
script. It could also be run “windowless” as
a daemon using Xvfb.

17. Experiment 2 succeeded: The
tool pdf2swf was mature and
worked pretty well.

18. Experiment 3 failed: The images were too large
and loaded too slow with the internet
connections at the time. The SWF way had the
added advantage of creating vector shapes
from PDF.

19. So something similar is what
I’d like you to do.

20. Explore the difficult problems in
your product that you don’t yet
have a solution to.

21. Remember: keep it
grounded. We are not doing
research here.

22. We are solving a customer
problem.

23. So: think of difficult engineering
problems within the product
narrative you have created for your
customer.

24. Aim to spend less than 5 days per
experiment. Remember: it’s
throwaway, you are just exploring
how to solve this.

25. The important thing is to
quickly learn what works.

26. Submit evidence of experiments
done. These could be code repos,
screenshots, descriptions of
experiments done, et. al.