What’s Cooking in Our Labs: SlideShare HandsFree!

by kapil on March 20, 2013

in Announcement,Hackdays,Hacks,User Experience

[Reposted from http://blog.slideshare.net/2013/03/19/whats-cooking-in-our-labs-slideshare-handsfree/]

Clicking through presentations can be cumbersome, especially when you’re talking through them with a live audience at hand. You have to find the right key on your keyboard, or move your mouse to the correct button, often halting the flow of your speech. What if you could just flick your finger in the air, indicating movement to the next page?

Our engineers are on it. We figured if you could play motion-sensing tennis on the Nintendo Wii, couldn’t you at least flip thought SlideShare presentations with the wave of a hand? Here’s a preview of what we’re working on:

And here’s what the engineer himself, Shirsendu Karmakar, had to say about developing it (yes, he’s pretty cool!):
If you have used/seen flutter, you wish you could use it on websites too. A few days back, I saw an interesting Chrome Experiment. My initial reaction: SlideShare “Minority Report” style! I started working on something similar for SlideShare. After an hour or so, with JavaScript as my weapon and some simple techniques and approximations, SlideShare presentations were gestures ready. It took me around 30 lines to code to make SlideShare work via my gestures.
Whats happening behind the scenes.

  • webRTC has made it possible to access the web camera directly from the browser. No Flash required!
  • A image is snapped at regular intervals.
  • HTML5 canvas is used to draw the current image.
  • The movement delta = The difference between the last image and the current image is calculated.
  • Depending on the value of delta, we try to detect which movement was done. Currently only for basic movements are supported: left, right, top, bottom.
  • Each of the directions are mapped with the SlideShare’s player API functions. Whenever, a movement is detected successfully, the player executes the mapped action.

What are other features you’d like to see us develop in SlideShare Labs?

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Introducing SlideShare API Explorer

by jai on November 19, 2012

in Announcement,API/Mashups

We know that at times it becomes difficult for you to keep up with our API documentation, which results in failed attempts at testing out an end point, and  in turn results in loss of productivity. To solve this issue, we created SlideShare API Explorer, which helps you get started with our API, and makes it super easy to test out an API endpoint.

Just follow the simple steps below:

1. Apply for an API key (requires a user account)- You’ll get the API credentials on your registered email address.
2. Go to apiexplorer.slideshare.net and fill in your credentials which you have received in the email.

Fill in your API Credentials

3. Now select an endpoint to test, fill in test parameters and click on ‘try it’. It will query our endpoint and show the generated query string, response headers and response body.

We are constantly working on making the API development workflow a seamless experience for you, and would love to hear your feedback/suggestions on this, feel free to share your comments below.

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DevelopHer Hackday Delhi

by Jeba Singh Emmanuel on June 22, 2012

in Announcement,Hackdays

DevelopHer Hackday Delhi
Announcing DevelopHer Hackday Delhi at SlideShare’s New Delhi office. First of its kind event! Same dates as DevelopeHer Hackday in the Bay Area organized by LinkedIn. Come on women geeks and hackers.. this is your stage! Form a team, code all night, create something awesome, and present it to the judges to win prizes.

Dave McClure (silicon valley guru, investor & founder of 500startups) and Rashmi Sinha will be judging the event. Participants in the winning team get an Apple Macbook Air each. Participants in the team winning the Second Prize get Apple iPads.

Are you ready? If you have not registered yet, hurry and register at http://hackday.linkedin.com/developher/delhi for the Hackday on Saturday, June 30th and Sunday, July 1st.

DevelopHer is being organised by LinkedIn at its Mountain View office. DevelopHer Hackday Delhi is a parallel event being organised by SlideShare (which is a part of LinkedIn now) at their New Delhi office

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SlideShare is looking for Rockstar Designers in New Delhi

by kapil on February 20, 2012

in Announcement,Design

[Reposted from the SlideShare Blog http://blog.slideshare.net/2012/02/17/designer-dream-job-in-delhi/]

Are you passionate about digital design? Do you dream of working at one of the world’s fastest growing startups? If you are an experienced web or interactive designer, come work with SlideShare in our New Delhi office. You’ll be collaborating closely with our software developers, product managers, and analysts to build products that reach millions of users.

Here’s what we’re looking for
- 1 to 5 years experience in similar role at a software, Internet or Web design company.
- Strong information and interaction design skills
- Proficiency in using common design tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Balsamiq
- Understanding of interface and interaction design principles as they relate to web sites, tablets, and handheld devices.
- Proven skills with XHTML (handcoding), and CSS.
- Excellent understanding of Web 2.0 design patterns
- Excellent collaboration, communication & writing skills
- Use of quantitive and qualitative feedback to make a design better. At SlideShare we use a variety of methods: A/B testing, viral loop tracking, user testing with tools like Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, CrazyEgg, Mixpanel, UserTesting
- College degree in Web design, Graphic Design, Interaction Design, HCI or Software Engineering

Show us what you’ve got
Be prepared to show us examples of:
- Your ability to conceptualize low-fidelity wireframes & mockups (using Powerpoint/Balsamiq/Photoshop), convert these into high fidelity prototypes and then handcode into HTML/CSS.
- Your strong visual design abilities: with web pages, microsites, marketing collateral, logos whatever you have designed.
- Wireframes, mockups and final designs that reflect rigorous attention to visual, interaction & usability details.

How to apply
Send your resume, with work samples and/or a link to your online portfolio to [email protected].

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6 foot clownfish swimming through the slideshare sf office

by jon on January 25, 2012

in Uncategorized

So we got one of those awesome thinkgeek toys a couple weeks ago … a huge remote-control fish. Amazingly, it propels itself by swimming … it doesn’t have a propeller or anything. As a result it looks amazingly realistic and is a lot of fun to drive. Here’s a video of it in action.

Of course we broke it within a couple of hours. But the kind folk at thinkgeek promise that spare parts should arrive any day now, so the fun will continue. We’re thinking of getting a great white share to go along with it, or possibly some remote-control piranhas!

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The buddy system: an alternative to pair programming

by jon on November 28, 2011

in Agile

Pair programming has always rubbed me the wrong way. I understand why some people like it. It’s great to have collective code ownership. It’s great to have conversations about what the code should look like before the code is actually written. And it’s great to have a collaborative work environment where people are always learning from each other.

But a LOT of people are turned off by pair programming. It’s too easy for the person who isn’t typing to just zone out. Some (many?) developers just don’t enjoy pair programming as a practice. It generates a LOT of noise (imagine 5 pairs of people talking at once). And no great internet company that I’m aware of seems to do it heavily. In fact, the biggest advocates of pair programming are often consulting shops (who charge by the programmer-hour and therefore have an obvious conflict of interest).

Trying to figure out how to get some of the benefits of pair programming without the drawbacks, we stumbled onto the “buddy system” at SlideShare. The rule is pretty simple: if you’re going to be doing something dangerous and complicated (like swimming or writing production ruby code) you probably shouldn’t be doing it alone.

So developers at slideshare just tend to work together on stuff. They don’t work on the same code … there’s always a bunch of different files that will need to be edited or created for implementing a new feature. But they’ll work on the new feature or bug together, usually in ad-hoc teams of two or three.

Some of the benefits of this approach are:
* Architecture and overall code structure always has a consensus of at least two behind it. If there’s a disagreement, it will be audible and the rest of the team can get involved as needed until consensus has been achieved. This dramatically reduces rework caused by one developer making an architectural decision that the rest of the team doesn’t agree with.
* There’s always someone available who can code-review your code and already understands the context of your code. This is crucial, because we do code-reviews before every checkin. And an uninformed code review doesn’t have value (it’s likely to be a “lgtm”, or “looks good to me”).
* There are always at least two people always understand a given section of the code base.
* The work feels a lot less lonely. There’s someone else deeply involved in the same problem that you are facing. It’s easy to learn from them because you’re working together.
* You still get lot’s of “me” time, with just you and the compiler. Lot’s of engineers got into programming because they enjoy quietly writing code, and there’s no need to take that away from people as long as enough collaboration is also happening.
* The collective nature of the work makes it more likely that peer pressure will keep developers from cutting corners on unit tests or other good practices that your team has adopted.

Just to be fair, there are a couple of disadvantages:
* Not all problems are big enough for two people to work on. Simple bug fixes, for example, should just be grabbed and worked on.
* Unlike pair programming, some code will typically be written before a second person looks at it. So you miss out on getting the feedback as early as possible (when the code is most easy to change and no one has emotional investment in it yet)

Overall, though, we’ve found the buddy system to be a remarkably fun and productive way of working.

Does this style of working sound fun to you? We’re always looking for great engineers, and can train you in Ruby if you’re already comfortable programming in other interpreted languages and are comfortable with Linux. Check out our jobs page for more info.

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Using sounds for ambient alerting in a web startup

October 13, 2011

Over the last few weeks, we’ve built a sound alerting system for the SlideShare office. What it does is make various noises in the slideshare office when a new subscription user signs up, cancels, or renews. It also makes sounds when a build fails, when a deployment to production starts, and when a deployment to [...]

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SlideShare Ditches Flash for HTML5

September 27, 2011

Watch our HTML5 gallery here. SlideShare today announced the biggest change since we started. We are now rendering presentations and documents using HTML5 instead of Flash. This is a milestone. 5 years ago, it was impossible to build something like SlideShare or Youtube without Flash. But the web has finally caught up. This project was [...]

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Applying for a SlideShare internship? Make sure to read this first hand account…

September 17, 2011

Saket Choudhary is an engineering student from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai who interned at the SlideShare Delhi office this summer (May15 – July15). He worked on an important internal project, which has since been rolled out to production. A couple of weeks back, Saket sent us this deck Sliding Summer on Rails@SlideShare that [...]

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DevOps at SlideShare: Talk given at DevOpsDays Bangalore 2011

September 2, 2011

We’ve adopted DevOps as a part of our culture at SlideShare. We believe that it was essential for us in order to become an agile & lean organization. DevOps has helped us in many ways, especially in our goal to do multiple deployments a day on production. At the recently concluded DevOpsDays conference in Bangalore, [...]

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