Okay! Most of the tech talk went over my head, but I grasped a lot of it. These are my favorite quotes:
"In the case of total and utter catastrophe, we could just reset [the boards] to zero and start again, they weren't designed for permanence anyway." (This I guess is one of the roots of the problem...the system was never designed to store as much info as it eventually required.)
"The new boards were kind of a hit. Maybe a smash hit. They quickly overshot my scribbled calculations of scale in a slightly worrying manner. With some judicious database tuning, the performance stayed OK though. For now." (uh-oh.)
"All of this was before the age of 'social media', and I could almost feel the shape of it hanging there, slightly beyond where we were heading, off-piste and in a direction we probably shouldn't venture into." (Interesting. Yes, social media does kind of condition people to expect immediate gratification, without taking the time to think things through or triage events/responses into different hierarchies of value. This is a loss.)
"I got a few PMs and emails from actual industry figures, which was always quite exciting. I personally banned a moderately famous Hollywood producer this one time, for abusive posting, which is something of a curiosity." (funny. I WONDER WHO IT WAS??)
"I learned lots and lots of things about movies and cinema history, much of it just by osmosis poring over the data sources." (Crazily, it never occurred to me the person who built the technical side of the boards wasn't a huge film fan, themselves!! But of course, there's actually no need for them to be to do their job.)
Thanks for the read : )
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