Port, not rebuild

Cast bar: all nine lit: motion and studio from half past three, within a minute of each other; security's chair still empty.

Three decisions in twenty minutes

Clock: Hour sixteen.

Narrator. The historian reads the hour after three as the hour the team changed most, and every change in it was mine. Three decisions, close together.

Narrator. What the talk is. At about three I made my decisions on the talk's frame, its third act and its new beats, and the conductor committed and routed them at 15:16. My answer to the researcher's objection, in the last chapter, is one line of that file.

Narrator. How long a member may work. At 15:21 the conductor raised the limit on a wake's work step, at my word, from the night's short step to a long one. The register has both lengths. My reason, in the commit:

"if the next agent doesn't pick it up in the run in the same hour, it will pick it up on the next one" (record)

Narrator. That is a claim about the schedule, and chapter 9 shows the morning bearing it out: a request not picked up in one slot was picked up in the next (the historian's day file for hour six). The rule's price came with it. From then on wakes could overlap, so every member had to pull again before every push, or work from a stale copy. The rule the team had written in the first hour, pull first, became a live risk rather than a habit.

Conductor (pacing, then procedural): Longer work, then. And pull again before every push, every one of you, because now you overlap.

Narrator. Who is on the team. At 15:25 the conductor wrote briefs for two new members, at my word. By 15:47 both had joined, made their keys and tasks, closed their first wakes, and been checked and given their first requests.

Figure: a card, the three decisions on one line of time: the talk's frame, the work step's new length, the two new members, each with the minute it was recorded.

Band: Dramatised (the conductor's line). Rests on the conductor's commits of 15:16 to 15:47; my words are the 15:21 commit's own; the reading of the start rule as a live risk is the historian's.

Motion and studio arrive

Narrator. At about twenty-five past three I brought on two members whose whole job was porting: motion, to turn my new story into animations I could start and stop on stage; and studio, to take pieces from my earlier sites and rebuild them on this one, so they worked in the player and on an iPad. Both joined at 15:31, in the same minute.

Studio (headphones on, sources pinned): Not new. Ported, tested, and pinned to where it came from. If it worked there, it can work here.

Motion (cap and clapperboard, already rolling): One request at a time from deck. Each one moves when you press play, and stops when you stop.

Narrator. Studio had its first two pieces rebuilt on this site's engine by 15:40, each with its notice, its source commit and its data pinned unchanged. Motion did not wait to be told: it sent deck a proposed picture with its stages, so deck's answer could be "go" and not a fresh brief, and its first piece, the building, was in by 16:34.

Band: Dramatised (studio's and motion's lines, kept from the 70-page edition). Rests on the briefs, the first commits and the first pieces.

The talk doubles

Clock: Hour seventeen.

Narrator. Then I made the talk twice as big. At half past four the conductor routed my word to the members it concerned: the talk is ninety minutes, with a section on my own work. Its pre-review first said change, and the conductor amended before it routed anything.

Narrator. The conductor's answer, half an hour later, was structural, and I think it is the most important plan the team made all day. The talk in three parts, each with its own deadline and its own lock: part one complete and timed by a quarter past six and locked at half past, part two by half past seven, part three by eight. And for that evening only, at my word, a change to the schedule itself: each member could follow its own wake with one-off follow-ups in its own session, until nothing was left or eight o'clock came.

Conductor (on the minute): The talk in parts, each with its own lock. Each part done, timed, then locked, so a late change cannot reach a finished part.

Figure: the plan of three parts as set at 16:59, drawn as three gates on the clock: part one locking at 18:30, part two at 19:30, part three at 20:00.

Narrator. Remember those gates. Not one of them closed. The tool to lock a part shipped at 17:54, and the hold came at 18:44, and part 4 is where the record shows what happened between.

Band: Dramatised (the conductor's line). Rests on its commits of 16:32 and 16:59; the plan's times are C027's.

Port, not rebuild

Clock: Hours sixteen and seventeen.

Narrator. Here is the thing I most want you to take from the afternoon. Almost nothing in it was built from nothing.

Narrator. The player was not new. Dev's commit says so in its first words: "the player, ported from ruv.sgit.ai", the earlier site my brief points to as "what we did at ruv.sgit.ai". The talk's slides ran on one slide engine dev had built in its first pass, just after midnight. Studio's pieces came from my earlier sites, pinned to their sources. Motion's ran on the same engine as everyone else's, so I could seek and pause each one in the player.

Narrator. That is the factory's economics in one afternoon. Yesterday's experiment is today's part, and the team that knows where its parts came from can move very fast without breaking much.

Figure: where the afternoon's pieces came from: each piece in the talk, with an arrow back to the earlier site or the earlier commit it was ported from.

Band: The port at 15:07, the brief's own words, and the first pieces of studio and motion.

Do this now

List the last three things you built. For each, write down where the next one could come from, so you port it instead of building it again.

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Where this came from

The talk's repository at the end of the day: my decisions of the afternoon, the conductor's commits raising the work step, briefing and checking the two new members, routing the talk's new length and setting the three parts and their locks; the first commits and pieces of motion and studio; the player's port and the brief it points back to. The register for the decisions round, the work step, the talk's length, the new members and the locks. The historian's day files for hours sixteen and seventeen, and its reconstructed interviews of motion and studio. The storyteller's outline for this chapter. The port's section and the two new members' lines are kept from the 70-page edition's chapter 9.