The tour: what a factory made in a day

Cast bar: the nine, greyed. Each lights for a moment as the tour reaches its work.

Narrator. Before I tell you how the factory worked, I want you to see what it made. Not the talk as the room saw it, on a screen behind me, but the site the talk lived on, as you can walk it today. Four stops. At each, one picture, a few lines from me, and one line from the agent that made it.

Words for this page: the conductor is the agent that keeps the team's time and plan. A hold is one short file that stops every agent until the person in charge says go.

How to read the scenes: they are dramatised. The words the agents say are ours, written for this book; the pages are the record's, and you can open every one of them online.

Stop 1. The talk as web pages, with its player

Figure: the talk's index page, and its player open on a slide: the timer, the step controls, the notes (index/talk-site/shots/talk.jpg, talk__player.jpg).

Narrator. The deck is a website. Every one of its 58 beats is a page that moves, and anyone can read it. The player is the piece I pressed play on: a timer against my time, steps that build one at a time, notes behind a key press. It is the thing I asked for first in the afternoon and was still asking to fix in the last hour.

Dev (happy, the fast one): Every slide is a page, so every slide has a link, a history and a check before it goes out. The player just walks them in order.

Band: Dramatised. Rests on the talk's pages and player as they stood at the end of the day.

Stop 2. The dashboard and the hold

Figure: the team's dashboard, drawn: a clock, the hold, what waits on the editor, and every wake as a grid.

Narrator. The team's state, read from its own files, on one page. It was built from the members' status files and wake records, not typed by anyone. And it still shows the hold of that night, with my usage as the reason, because the page was last built after the stop. Nobody tidied it.

Conductor (at ninety-five, then calm): The page shows what the files say. The files say we stopped. So the page says we stopped.

Band: Dramatised. Rests on the dashboard as built from the team's own files, still showing the hold.

Stop 3. Every wake and every note

Figure: the wakes page: each member's wakes, newest first, with the five steps, each step's verdict and its comment.

Narrator. This is the page I would show anyone who doubts that the factory ran on its own for nine hours. Every wake of every member, with its plan, its two reviews, the work and the check that it went to plan, each with a verdict and a sentence. On the day the agents kept 162 wake records. The page's own counter says 163 (the librarian's study of the site); the researcher's register says 162, and the book gives the register's number.

Narrator. And next to it, every commit the team made, with its whole message: 439 by the agents themselves, not counting merges. Many of them carry short notes from one agent to another, in a line that starts with "To-" and the other's name. Read in order, they are the team talking.

Researcher (unbudging): The page has a counter. I have a register. When they differ, the book uses mine and says why.

Band: Dramatised. The counts are the register's: wake records and the agents' own commits; the page's own count of wakes is one higher.

Stop 4. A member's page

Figure: one member's page, deck's: its role, its policy in prose, its rules with the mistake behind each one, its status, its wakes and its debriefs; its key lines cropped out.

Narrator. Last stop. Every member has a page like this, built from its own folder. What I like about it is the rules: each one has the mistake behind it, the moment the rule was needed. A page of rules you can read like a short history of what went wrong.

Deck (proud, the fussy one): Every rule on my page cost somebody a slide. That is why it is there.

Band: Dramatised. Rests on deck's member page as built from its folder; the page's key section is not shown.

What the tour leaves out

Narrator. Two pages are not on this tour: the page of the team's keys, and the page of its vaults. Every member published its own key from its own session, and the vaults' read keys were published on purpose, under a warning in red that every file in them is public, forever. A book does not need to print them to make the point, so it does not.

Figure: the site as a building, one floor per kind of page: the talk at the top, the workshop of animations, the studio, and at the bottom the team's own records.

Narrator. That is what one day made. Now the rest of this book is how.

Do this now

Look at one thing you made last month. Write down what someone would need to see to understand it without you in the room.

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Where this came from

The librarian's study of the talk's site: its list of the site's best things, its tour material, its screenshots and its notes on the members' pages, the studio and the visuals. The talk's site as it stood at the end of the day. The researcher's register for the slides, the wakes and the commits. Security's condition, kept: no page that prints a key. The storyteller's outline for this chapter.