Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 8, 2008 Continuous integration step-by-step Lets start with the basics: Martin Fowlers original article lays out the mechanics of how to set up a CI server and the essential rules to follow while doing it. The more code, the bigger the pile. I think they are the same thing.

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Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. Especially for a startup, not taking maximum advantage of free software is crazy.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. The idea is that once we move to the new system (or coding standard, or API, or.)

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, March 25, 2010 Speed up or slow down? for Harvard Business Review) Over at Harvard Business Review, Ive been building up a series designed to introduce the Lean Startup methodology to a business-focused audience. In the early days, chaos stayed under control.

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Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now A great checklist of techniques and tools for making your development more agile, written from a Rail perspective.

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Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? It became harder and harder to separate how the software is built from how the software is structured. If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not?

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. Each specialist takes up his part of the spec (UI, middleware, backend) and cranks out code. October 6, 2008 12:17 AM r& said.

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San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. This is easiest to see in deployment.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, December 7, 2008 The hackers lament One of the thrilling parts of working and writing in Silicon Valley is the incredible variety of people Ive had the chance to meet. Hes just as comfortable writing code as racking servers, debugging windows drivers, or devising new interview questions.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, November 6, 2008 Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile I thought Id share an interesting post from someone with a decidedly anti-agile point of view. Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective.

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Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 2, 2008 Paul Graham on fundraising I have found no better primer on the current realities of starting a new technology company in a startup hub like Silicon Valley than Paul Grahams essays. Your natural tendency when an investor says yes will be to relax and go back to writing code.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

My experience is in Enterprise Software - where we are forced to chunk features into formal releases. While it is still possible - and recommended to experiment with customers in order to determine the minimum that they need, the exercise is bit more complicated due to the formality of the release process.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. The same might be said of good software. Here we have the beginnings of a theory of design for software.

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Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 15, 2008 The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time Split-testing is a core lean startup discipline, and its one of those rare topics that comes up just as often in a technical context as in a business-oriented one when Im talking to startups. September 15, 2008 9:12 PM Hitchens said.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

But there is more to technical debt than just the interest payments that come due. In particular, try these three things: Invest in technical debts that may never come due. Yet there is one silver lining when it does happen: we wind up throwing out working code , debt-riddled and elegantly designed alike.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

When I wrote a review of Four Steps on this blog in November, 2008, I did my best to be candid and warn of a few shortcomings: And Steve is the first to admit that its a "turgid" read, without a great deal of narrative flow. Four Steps primarily centers its stories and case studies on B2B hardware and software startups.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, May 31, 2010 Thank you The past month has been an incredible roller coaster: #sllconf was a trending topic (briefly topping Justin Bieber before the wifi in the hotel gave out), the Web 2.0 And a special thanks is due to all of our presenters, panelists, and mentors. And then you can buy a t-shirt.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

See Paul Grahams Why Nerds are Unpopular to learn more) Take a look at this article on a programming Q&A site: How old are you, and how old were you when you started coding? We also learned that law is code , and that leadership was needed to build thriving communities in a digital age. Can I send you a review copy?

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Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. Every change required a server restart.

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PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, June 17, 2010 No departments Big companies have departments. I was the junior guy on a project team; I was called in to do some technical due diligence for reasons that were obscure to me, because the team already had much more senior engineers assigned to it. Startups are companies.

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Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Due to an interaction effect between your hardware, solar flares, and quantum flux, this virus will crash your computer and erase your hard drive sometime soon. In the past, we invested in brilliant architecture, code reuse, refactoring, modular design, etc. I have detected a secret virus in your CPU. The curse of prevention Beware!

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San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Im also excited to share two long-form reviews from actual attendees. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. More recently it's skewed to software & web. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, Articulate, inspirational.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, September 18, 2008 How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone I have had the opportunity to meet a lot of iPhone-related companies lately. All I see is a name, an icon, a price, the developers name, and a review star-rating. The reviews are all over the map. I cant really tell.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

For example, a site outage may seem like it was caused by a bad piece of code, but: why was that code written? The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

At IMVU , these were quite common (after all, were shipping code 50 times a day). They are collected and reviewed after an appropriate interval (e.g. In response to Sean - Intel still runs a very formal process of setting expectations, evaluating employees and reviewing progress on a quarterly basis. love your openness at IMVU.

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Employee San Francisco Lean Software Review 146

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible. Fail faster. Great post!!!

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 27, 2010 Good enough never is (or is it?) Over time, such teams either explode due to irreconcilable differences or dramatically slow down. Lean manufacturing , agile software development , and Theory of Constraints are all examples of this idea in action.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, May 14, 2009 The Lean Startup Workshop - now an OReilly Master Class My rate of posting has been much lower lately, and this is mostly due to preparations for the upcoming Lean Startup Workshop on May 29. This shift allowed us to crank out working software quickly as a service. It was a disaster.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

I believe it is a full, company-wide turn through the OODA loop (for a software business, see especially Ideas-Code-Learn ). You need a process for systematically reviewing your costs and eliminating those that slow you down. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, What counts as an iteration?

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. For example, the best book reviewers only review books published by the best publishers, which only accept manuscripts from the best agents. And how could they possibly review a blog? Is that a lot? Is that good?

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, October 11, 2008 Three decisions to make on virtual goods I was invited to the Virtual Goods Summit yesterday, and got to see quite a few interesting speakers and panels. The credit is due to much smarter people than me, and to the incredible power of necessity, that mother of invention.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

For a consumer internet company in particular, this is often due to a lack of design thinking. In an entrepreneurial situation, this is hard, because artifacts that we are creating (products, code, marketing campaigns, even revenue) are of secondary importance. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

It connects to the internet to automatically download the necessary codes. Heres a representative view from an actual Amazon customer review : We all know how to operate our own entertainment center, but what happens when you have to explain it to your babysitter, mother-in-law, or your wife? They want to do activities.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

In fact, I am convinced that if you could find some of IMVU’s earliest adopters, they would say something like this: “sure, those guys at IMVU HQ were helpful in writing code and stuff, but in the end they were just the hired help. peer review is NOT working. It was really the community who built that product.&#

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