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Fast

patrickcollison.com

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Re: Fast

#11

Post by norir »

entrepy123 wrote: post #6
valtism wrote: post #2

> Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started. Source: Tony Fadell. Just 290 days for the iPod to go from idea to customer is crazy fast

Impressive for sure, not to knock it. But, as I recall reading, the mini HDD for the iPod was already developed by a vendor's R&D, sitting around for a use case. Which Apple decided to take exclusive advantage of. Thus, that iPod offering seemed kind of "revolutionary". But it's not like Apple started the project, then developed all of the tech for it in this time of 290 days. Which is sort of what the summary reads…

Wow, I did not know that story but it makes so much sense that the ipod was an almost inevitable development from the mini hdd. Goes to show how important it is to have people who can see the big picture and find the right people to execute.

Re: Fast

#12

Post by nine_zeros »

Literally every single thing in this list was produced by a group of people moving towards a well-defined, unified goal.

But in today's FAANG and FAANG-wannabes, these kinds of efforts are near impossible because of middle-management politics. So much of time goes in stack ranking and performance reviews that no engineer is ever going to collaborate.

Perhaps CEOs are so far removed from their employees that they don't even realize what is actually going on in the company.

Re: Fast

#13

Post by oli5679 »

mamonster wrote: post #3

Very interesting thing(maybe sample representativeness) is that there aren't any "fast" things from the 2010-2020 decade. Does anyone have anything impressive in mind? Personally can't think of anything myself.

Alphago?

I think it only took a couple of years from 2014-16, and it was marked as being decades away by many experts at the time.

I also remember lots of ridicule about Instagram only being a year or so old, when it was acquired, and possibly some of the Space X rocket development programs count as ‘fast’ although I don’t know all the details.

Re: Fast

#14

Post by yellow_lead »

entrepy123 wrote: post #6
valtism wrote: post #2

> Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started. Source: Tony Fadell. Just 290 days for the iPod to go from idea to customer is crazy fast

Impressive for sure, not to knock it. But, as I recall reading, the mini HDD for the iPod was already developed by a vendor's R&D, sitting around for a use case. Which Apple decided to take exclusive advantage of. Thus, that iPod offering seemed kind of "revolutionary". But it's not like Apple started the project, then developed all of the tech for it in this time of 290 days. Which is sort of what the summary reads…

Much of these examples similarly lack any info on prior work. i.e mRNA COVID vaccines were completed quickly, after years of prior research.

Re: Fast

#15

Post by lemming »

> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995.

And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.

Re: Fast

#16

Post by cornfutes »

> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days

And thousands of developer years have been wasted smoothing over pre ES6 JavaScript warts.

Re: Fast

#17

Post by babelfish »

I recently read the book “How Big Things Get Done”, about planning megaprojects successfully, which incidentally touched on a lot of the projects here. While I mostly found the book to be worthless thought leadership, the authors thesis on why these projects were able to succeed is that they were able to “think slow, build fast”.

Re: Fast

#18

Post by gizmo »

entrepy123 wrote: post #6
valtism wrote: post #2

> Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started. Source: Tony Fadell. Just 290 days for the iPod to go from idea to customer is crazy fast

Impressive for sure, not to knock it. But, as I recall reading, the mini HDD for the iPod was already developed by a vendor's R&D, sitting around for a use case. Which Apple decided to take exclusive advantage of. Thus, that iPod offering seemed kind of "revolutionary". But it's not like Apple started the project, then developed all of the tech for it in this time of 290 days. Which is sort of what the summary reads…

They had to design the software, the UX including the touch wheel, the mac integration and syncing, and everything relating to the design, materials, and sourcing of the components. It’s astonishing that they got it done in less than a year. (And I highly recommend Fadell’s book)

Re: Fast

#19

Post by jyxent »

dragontamer wrote: post #5
cscheid wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that saved an estimated couple of million lives comes to mind.

COVID19 vaccine was 2021, wasn't it? Just slightly outside the decade. A lot of war-equipment got spun up in 2022 and 2023 extremely quickly, but I don't think people are talking about that. ----------- EDIT: The 2010s through 2020s were a period of incredibly low interest rates and cheap money. Most projects were thinking long-term, for good reason. When interest rates are 0% and you got free money / free borrowing,…

I guess it depends what endpoint you are talking about. The actual vaccine was pretty quick, it was the phases of testing that took longer: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1682852/000119312520...
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