Critical Point War Stories: Software Engineers Talk Breaking Production

Abhijit Mehta tells how one tiny dot made almost made a massive difference to Twitter's Turkish ad revenue.

Abhijit's Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhijitCMehta
Abhijit's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehtaabhijit/

Chapters:

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:25) - How did you find yourself in a place where you could break production?
• (08:53) - Akamai & the 'aha' moments of product development
• (15:30) - Google & the Google culture
• (17:35) - Twitter & what's the difference between brand ads and direct-response ads?
• (23:58) - How Twitter made its money
• (27:58) - Re-architecting the fundamental ad platform at Twitter
• (32:35) - "We had to be really careful!"
• (34:48) - "There's something really weird happening in Turkey"
• (37:49) - The meaning of scale
• (41:02) - "Well we'd thought of all the horses, so we started looking for zebras"
• (43:48) - "So here's what happened"
• (49:30) - "So this will work fine almost everywhere"
• (53:51) - How do you roll things like this out safely?
• (59:56) - "In general I'm an optimist, there's exciting things to come"
• (01:03:52) - Thanks & CTAs

Credits:

Emoji artwork is provided by Emojitwo (https://emojitwo.github.io/), originally released as Emojione 2.2 (https://www.emojione.com/) by Ranks.com (http://www.ranks.com/) with contributions from the Emojitwo community and is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode).

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

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