[wskish]

I see that whiteboard as a mechanism to help build a shared mental model for all assembled. Everyone there has seen some previous unknown revision of architectural diagrams, and has their own partial model of the system. Due to the urgency at hand, they all need to have a crisp shared model of the important parts, down to the naming of things.

[mhh__]

If you need a shared mental model diagram at the 1am pseudo-crunch-a-thon then you're doing something wrong.

Identifying what you want to fix should be written down but the structure of the app should not be what is being discussed at 1am

[wskish]

I agree with you in ideal circumstances.

[divbzero]

What puzzles me is that Twitter’s greatest challenges in recent years have not been technical. There shouldn’t be a technical emergency that requires an urgent call for all software engineers.

[dingaling]

That single Tweet took eleven seconds to load on my phone, up to the point that all spinners stopped and all elements were visible. That seems typical for Twitter on the web these days and suggests there is something technically wrong in the stack.

[HaZeust]

That's a hell of a hand-wave. But for Twitter's sake, I hope you're right.

[wskish]

I am just imagining how to start a meeting with the remaining 25% skeleton crew of technical folks. Seems like drawing a map of the system and allowing various folks to contribute their part would be a super positive experience all around. What would be other alternative explanations?

[georgeg23]

Only about 70 employees showed up (out of 7500 a month ago).

[wskish]

crazy situation; all the more reason to draw a map to see where we are all at.

[tomlockwood]

Imagine you're thinking about buying a 44B business and want to radically change its business model, and potentially, plan to fire a lot of technical people. What are the things you need to know to achieve this?