Sensitive souls abstain — While he has sown doubts, confusion and chaos on Twitter and speculation about the future (or otherwise) of the platform is rampant, yesterday Elon Musk posted photos in the presence of the engineers of the social network (at least, what’s left of it 👀) .
After an ultimatum to all teams this week asking them to commit to long-hour, high-intensity work to build what he calls “Twitter 2.0,” the multibillionaire appears to be delivering on his promises with a code review this week. Friday afternoon and who would play overtime… until when half past one !
It wasn’t the first time that Elon Musk had considered a code review with the developers of the social network: on the very day of his inauguration, October 27, the new CEO had in fact asked the developers to prepare to present their code to him, making a specific request: they had to print some of their code.
After a quick rollback (and several hundred panicked sheets of paper), the Musk-esque code review fell into oblivion, like one of the entrepreneur’s many escapades, until this Friday.
In a series of emails sent in the 24 hours preceding his meeting with the engineers, Musk reportedly asked to meet with “anyone who writes code”, subsequently inviting them to gather on the 10th floor of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, of which he has been busy with its acquisition of the platform ever since.
Prior to this different type of code review, the developers were also asked to prepare a brief inventory of their product code over the past six months, as well as 10 screenshots of their most relevant lines of code.
Elon Musk later showed up in the presence of his pale-skinned crews in a latest tweet, photo of a leaning blackboardon which a diagram seems to describe the architecture of the social network, a rather rare element of transparency in companies of this kind.
Just left the Twitter HQ code review pic.twitter.com/pYcXRTJm14
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2022
Another surprising fact: when asked by the engineer and author of technical books Alex Xu, who clarified this pattern, Elon Musk replied by transcribing his notes from the evening in the form of a tweet:
Last night’s notes:
– Maybe deprecate TLS this week, as only needed if android app is more than 1 year old.
– Home mixer calculates Home ~10x faster than Timeline.
– Ad Mixer can dramatically improve relevance at the cost of lower total ad views. The more interesting the ad, the more time you watch it.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2022
Doesn’t the story say if it is a simple publicity stunt (among many) by the billionaire or a real involvement on his part with the technical teams?
Maybe both after all, who knows.
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