Prezi Staff Blog

The testing of the snark

Prezi Jobs admin — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:06:02 +0000

Hi. My name is Peter and I work for Prezi in Budapest.

Every day at prezi, we strive to release software that is smarter, faster and more beautiful than yesterday's.

In order to do that, we deploy new versions of the product several times a day.

This would be impossible without up-to-date tests which point out problems before our users find them.

Instead of creating a long document for how tests should be treated, I wrote a silly poem.

Hopefully it will do its part in ensuring Prezi becomes even better than it is today!

The testing of the snark

When Jenkins screams

"You broke the build", improve

the current ugly state.

Check the commits

in the build: does one belong to you?

If the answer's "yes"

There's no need to guess:

We expect a bugfix from you.

No patch is ever perfect,

and tests have issues too.

It's quite ok to fuck it up

If you're willing to fix it soon!

If you have to run

then find someone

who will clean up

the mess after you.

Reverted commits are a painful sight

but don't make others stay all night.

Please consider your fellow devs

and when leaving, revert your bad revs

Day and night we labor,

to make our tests succeed.

So whatever you do,

never deploy

if Jenkins does not agree.

These rules may sound silly

and frustrating to some.

But follow them, and I guarantee,

we'll all have loads of fun!

Prezi Culture Research

David Malpass — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:51:04 +0000

Design Overtime

Chris Connick — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:48:58 +0000

On Thursday 29th April members from our design team, Ux research, developer team, and Twiggy (one of our Prezi dogs) participated in the Innovation Expedition design thinking workshop, hosted by Epicenter - an initiative that aims at transforming engineering education across the United States, promoting entrepreneurship and innovation skills.

Teams from Google, Apple, Prezi, and a group of engineering students from Stanford University participated in the workshop.

The workshop began with an exercise on brainstorming - focusing on techniques that help generate a free flow of ideas. Then it was time to face a challenge: each team had to design a ‘gift-giving experience’ for a client. Working to strict time restrictions through each phase - the teams had to brainstorm a rough idea then design, consult, refine and present it to the client and the whole group.

“The brief we were set made for a really fun and challenging experience. Our client wanted to share occasion-based experiences with their friends and relatives, rather than physical gifts. So our idea was to create a device which visually records the time spent together with someone - and also maps physiological signals of both you and the person you’re sharing the experience with. This way, it can not only record snapshots of the occasion for posterity, but also records when you both ‘felt good’ - and you can then use this data to plan more occasions together which you both enjoy.”

- Laci Laufer: Prezi Ux Researcher.

With the event being held from 1pm in California, it proved a test of our Budapest-based team’s mental agility - powering through a full day's work beforehand, then participating in the workshop from 10pm to 2am with a level of stamina that would make most grown-ups weep. Of course, some beers were imbibed to aid the late-night thought process...

Check out some more pics of the event below!

Barking up the right tree

Chris Connick — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:31:16 +0000

Last week we were joined by Matt Meeker, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of meetup.com, for several events held across Budapest.

On Friday afternoon we hosted a Prezi employee lunch in our offices with Matt as guest speaker. In his talk Matt shared some cool highlights of his journey so far. We learned that his entrepreneurial roots stem from his grandparents owning a farm in Iowa, and his love of all things Internet was born from attendance at a newly-formed 1995 “Internet 101” class at University.

Matt @ Prezi Office, BudapestThis early exposure to both business and technology no doubt served him well on the path to founding one of the first Internet ad companies in 1996, then co-founding meetup.com, the online social networking portal that allows users to easily arrange offline gatherings.

Matt’s goal with meetup.com was to counter a growing statistical trend towards hard-working humans preferring a night at home in front of the TV over more social activities, and with 9.5 million registered users and growing, it’s been a bonafide success in helping people connect in communities worldwide. At Prezi we love this idea and regularly host 3 meetups ourselves.

As a company, meetup is now 100+ employees strong and it was great to share experiences with Matt and see what we could learn as Prezi’s own employee count continues to grow.

I asked Matt for some thoughts on his visit to Prezi:

“I'm a big fan of Prezi. There's a feeling around really successful, fast-growing companies that is hard to put into words, but I've experienced it a few times in my career and it's really fun. Prezi has that feeling.

It's this feeling where you're adding new people to the team, almost on a daily basis. And each of those people is excited about joining the journey and adding their energy to it. Everyone already in the company knows the product and the vision inside out and evangelizes it constantly, to strangers and each other. The people who work on it are friends and colleagues, with a tremendous amount of respect for each other. It's like you're cherishing this time as a small company and being a tight-knit group, knowing that soon the company will be too big for just one group like that.

The growth is off the charts. Some people would look at that and say it's all about the idea, or all about the product, or some great marketing. In my view, those are components of the success, but the real magic is in the culture that's been built. The culture is the fuel that makes all of those other things happen. It's really special.

I saw it daily there, and saw it at the Friday night meetup at Moloko bar when HP & Juli nearly killed me with an Unicum overdose. :) I saw it Saturday night at your apartment when ~20 people showed up, hung out, talked Prezi, and understood each other even better. It's just an amazing culture and I believe the success of the company flows directly from that culture.”

It’s clear that Matt has a love of start-up in his blood, and this passion has led him to move on to his latest venture, Barkbox, a cool monthly subscription service offering hand-selected goodies and essentials for man's best friend. For now Matt seems to be thriving on building another great idea from the ground up, and everyone here at Prezi (especially our two office dogs) will be watching Barkbox keenly over the year ahead.

Matt's dog Hugo - Head of Product @ Barkbox?

We really appreciate Matt’s time spent at Prezi and look forward to more meetups in the future. And remember at Prezi we never skip an opportunity to share ideas, so we will be regularly inviting more interesting people into our offices for talks and events - watch this blog for updates!

Living Lonely in Budapest?

Chris Connick — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 22:54:20 +0000

Post by: Chris Connick

Role: Curriculum Designer

Joined Prezi: Jan 9th 2012

I have lived most of my life in Glasgow, Scotland. It’s a city which over the last decade has seen a well documented darker side outshined by it’s growing reputation for fostering creativity and the arts. Check out these subculture pioneers from the music, fashion, arts and craft scenes to see what’s been changing attitudes in Glasgow recently.

It’s a new Scottish culture that I have lived and love, and one which I knew I’d miss greatly when I accepted a position at Prezi (a decision also based very much on heart) and relocated to their Budapest office. I was unsure what to expect from this Eastern European capital…

Luckily many of my co-workers have managed relocation to this town before me, and they have been incredible in opening my eyes to what Budapest has to offer. My French-Caribbean colleague recently hosted a night out to see “the world’s leading kitchen appliance rock group” Hurra Torpedo at the A38 boat. It’s a venue that’s just been voted the best bar in the world by the Lonely Planet guide in this reader poll. It may well be deservedly so, the experience of listening to upcoming new bands whilst taking in stunning night views from it’s mooring on the River Danube makes for a most memorable evening.

A38 Boat Another great place I discovered (through some new Hungarian friends) is Szimpla Kert, a venue with an artistic, bohemian vibe whose deceptively small entranceway opens into a large courtyard of several bars, dancefloors and performance spaces. Incidentally, Szimpla came in at the number 3 spot in the same lonely planet poll.

Szimpla Kert An impressive performance from Budapest in gaining global recognition for it’s nightlife, but perhaps both of these venues have simply been good at crowdsourcing votes, as I’ve also enjoyed great Prezi nights out at Keksz, Fogas haz and Instant, all wonderful “ruinpubs” that have cropped up in disused building spaces in the heart of the city and all offering music, art and fashion in as healthy doses as the drinks they pour. And if I ever feel homesick I can always visit Caledonia Budapest, a Scottish bar that does very authentic Haggis, Scottish whiskies and ales whilst English Premier League football fills the TV screens.

I’m enjoying my time here in Budapest and so far my experiences have been as vibrant and exciting as anything my home town has to offer. Each day I can’t wait to explore more of this city with my new friends and colleagues.

Chris Connick: Curriculum Designer @ Prezi

Prezi in a Roma Ghetto

Prezi Jobs admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:46:11 +0000

Early 2012 fifty-three Prezi employees painted and floored a school, remodeled a community bathroom facility, leveled a small soccer field, replaced windows in thirty-two of a Roma ghetto’s houses.

Create prezis with gestures

Prezi Jobs admin — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:23:09 +0000

Ever wondered how comfortable it would be to edit your prezi while sitting on the sofa? What if you could just lay back and make presentation by controlling Prezi with voice and hand gestures? Well, we felt the same way—it'd be cool! And that was our project for the last Prezi Hackathon.

We used Kinect to capture the body movements. It has a built-in camera, depth sensor and even voice recognition. We set up a computer that was connected to the Kinect. For the sake of ease we used the official Kinect SDK for communicating with the device. It provides a high level interface and gives back rather precise skeleton coordinates of the user. While Linda, guest participant in our team, started to implement a socket server on the .NET side to send the coordinates through a socket to the Prezi application, Balint, Senior Developer at Prezi, extended the online Prezi editor to accept these coordinates and displayed the left and right hands on the canvas—Maria, our wonderful designer, helped us by creating lovely graphics for them.

As we had limited time in the Prezi Hackathon, we narrowed down the scope of the project to only the hands and some voice commands. We came up with the following idea: in Edit mode, users can interact with Prezi using both hands. If you're slightly further away from the Kinect, you can move freely, but as you move your left hand closer, you can reach out for the canvas and pan it. With your right hand, you can pick up objects on the canvas and can drag them away. And what if the objects are too small? Just say "Prezi, zoom in", or "Prezi, zoom out" to see a wider range of objects. To make these commands really fun, we put together a demo puzzle game.

So do you like it? Or do you think you could have made a cooler hack? Do you have a better idea? Well, join the Prezi team now, and help people share their ideas by making the Prezi experience even more usable and fun!

Arthur, say hello!

Prezi Jobs admin — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 05:26:00 +0000

Arthur is working with us 24/7. He is a robot and can be remote controlled via the company chat room. You can use him to announce when the lunch is ready, or drop him a line with a YouTube link, he will immediately start to play it on his loudspeakers.

And what happens if an automatic test fails? He switches to maximum volume, turns on an annoying siren and his little cap starts to flash! Of course the most used command is: "stop".

Prezi Hackaton 2

Prezi Jobs admin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 06:30:00 +0000

Last weekend, 37 hackers, including we the Prezi employees and students from around the world, spent two days in the Prezi office to create fun, and (sometimes) useful projects using Prezi.

What the heck is a hackathon?

Our hackathon is a 1-2 days long event when you can work on what you want, if and only if you can convince 3 other people to work with you. Usually this simple rule is enough to select interesting projects.

Why?

Because we are all hackers: we are motivated to do something just because we can (do it) and others think it can be done.

What we made:

Prezi Kinect Hack: Control your prezi using body gestures
Prezi Wars: Use Prezi Meeting to play a third-person shooter with your friends
WebGL Prezi: The results are in, our developers tackled creating a rough version of Prezi in WebGL!
Prezi Usage Map: A zoomable map of prezi creations, visits, and tweets about Prezi
Whiteboard to Prezi application: Automatically create a prezi from a photo you’ve taken
Hipchat bot: Type in a command in hipchat, our HP bot will let the office know what’s up; break something in Prezi, sirens and lights!
Democratic Voting in Prezi: Make life’s toughest decisions using Prezi voting
Prezi Logo from Post-its: See the Prezi logo, made “pixel by pixel” from Post-it notes