The importance of silly projects

August 31, 2011

In engineering, we love to hack. It’s not just something we do because we get paid … it’s something we do for fun (that’s what’s kinda awesome about software engineering as a job). Obviously we’re usually working on the core product, building new features, fixing bugs, and refactoring code to make it harder/faster/better/stronger. But sometimes, [...]

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Suicide Workers

May 4, 2011

At SlideShare, we process many thousands of documents a day. The documents come in all types, from PDF and PPT to Keynote files. The pace of uploads is heavy, and varies dramatically over time. The documents have to be processed from their native formats into a process that is sharable on the web. This is [...]

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The Brady Calendar!

April 18, 2011

Came across this on SlideShare. Tells a geeky story – hilarious! Brady Calendar

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How EC2 gave us a 130x throughput increase in generating millions of images

April 8, 2011

Images are a key part of the zillions of websites out there, and SlideShare is no different.  A few weeks back, we made some optimizations to load images below the fold lazily.  In this post, we discuss some more optimizations we have done to user profile pictures. Across SlideShare, there are primarily 3 sizes of [...]

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Thoughts about cloud computing

March 30, 2011

I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with Microsoft’s Robert Duffner recently for his “Thought Leaders in the Cloud” Series (the conversation is available here). We talked for about 30 minutes about cloud computing blunders (something we’ve had plenty of experience with at SlideShare ;->) and the benefits of hybrid architectures. I think it’s [...]

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Faster page loads with image lazy loading

March 14, 2011

Almost all traffic on slideshare goes to one type of page: the “view” page (the page where a document is displayed). As a result, we spend a lot of energy trying to tune the code that generates that page. Any decrease in page load time that we can get directly improves the user experience for [...]

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Puppet in the Cloud

March 2, 2011

We’ve used Puppet (a system configuration management software) to automate our cluster of physical servers for a couple of years. But it wasn’t until about a month ago that we managed to get our cloud servers (hosted on Amazon EC2) under the control of puppet. This blog post is to explain how (and why) we [...]

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WordPress plugin for embedding a SlideShare presentation

February 25, 2011

We have recently prepared a WordPress plugin which will make it easier to embed a presentation on your WordPress blogs. After you install and activate this plugin, you won’t have to copy and and paste the embed code. The only thing required will be putting the link to the presentation in your post. This will [...]

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API Launch : oEmbed

February 25, 2011

We have recently started supporting oEmbed. oEmbed is an open standard which supports embedding of media on your web site. You can use slideshow URL to easily obtain the embed code for that SlideShow. The oEmbed Specs is the best place to know about oEmbed. SlideShare supports oEmbed specification for making the embeddable media available through [...]

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It’s here! Our shiny new Javascript API

February 25, 2011

[Reposted from the SlideShare Blog http://blog.slideshare.net/2011/01/24/its-here-our-shiny-new-javascript-api/] Attention developers…you asked for it, and here it is. Our new Javascript API allows users to access major functions, navigate across presentations, and control the SlideShare embed player via Javascript. For your embedded presentations, you can now make JS calls to do things like view next and previous slides, [...]

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