To design and develop an interactive globe

> Despite the impending release, an executive (it was Patrick) posed to us: what would you build if you had the time to do it the way you wish you could?

Funny how CEO of Stripe is still participating in such (seemingly) low level decisions. Can't imagine that CEO of Ford for example would participate in new site design and development.

This is a cool project.

I am amazed that there are companies this big that investing so much time into building what’s essentially a gimmick has positive RoI

There is an interesting chicken-and-egg problem in our line of business, in that we have to convince you that we're not just normal-software-company levels of trustworthy and competent, but trustworthy and competent enough for you to put us solidly in the middle of your revenue. Additionally, due to the way our business works, we might have to do that before you even have revenue.

So we invest quite a bit in "the little things." I don't think we'd call them gimmicks. Error messages, for example, certainly aren't gimmicks; they're a classic product feature for an API, but they're afterthoughts in most places and we sweat them enough such that one of every X,000 developers debugging their integration will praise the error message (specifically) to their colleagues or friends. We aspire to that level of care up and down the stack. This includes our web presences; they're shipping software products of our company, after all.

The same sort of chicken-and-egg problem applies to hiring, by the by. The best reason to work somewhere is the colleagues. How do you let people experience the colleagues before the colleagues have convinced them to work for you? Our answer: you create replete evidence that the kind of people you'd end up working with would spend weeks getting a globe animation right and that the people who manage/promote/etc them would say "Absolutely yes, the home page redesign doesn't ship until we have a globe animation we can be proud of."

These giant companies employ/stockpile vast numbers of elite programmers who they don’t really need.

So they build other things. Nice work if you can get it.

The majority of land data that is used as the backbone for land registry, lotting, road planning, etc etc is stored...

...as datasets based on 2D map projections.

And different places have different projection systems.

2D projections will be with us for a long time.