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. Expo SF (May.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Integration risk is the term I use to describe the costs of having code sitting on some, but not all, developers machines. It happens whenever youre writing code on your own machine, or you have a team working on a branch. It also happens whenever you have code that is checked-in, but not yet deployed anywhere.

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Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

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. Defective prototype code was as often thrown out (because customers didnt want it) as it was fixed (when customers did).

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Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

If engineers want more time to spend making their old code more pretty, they are invited to do so on the weekends. The idea is that once we move to the new system (or coding standard, or API, or.) The current code is spaghetti, but the new code will be elegant. Its become "legacy code" and part of the problem.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

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? If not, whos going to insist we switch to free and open source software?

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Each specialist takes up his part of the spec (UI, middleware, backend) and cranks out code. So the product manager winds up actually having to use the software, by hand, updating the spec and helping create a new test plan. In exchange, the team agrees to show each piece of working code to the product manager for his approval.

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San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Our code pushes take another six minutes. Since these two steps are pipelined that means at peak we’re pushing a new revision of the code to the website every nine minutes. On average we deploy new code fifty times a day. Code reviews and pairing Great practices. Throwing out a lot of code.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

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. For software, the easiest batch to see is code. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work. This is easiest to see in deployment.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

When I want to know about some concurrency issues between services in his cluster, he doesnt blink an eye when I suggest we get the source code and take a look. Hes just as comfortable writing code as racking servers, debugging windows drivers, or devising new interview questions. He throws off volumes of code, and it works.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. But there is more to technical debt than just the interest payments that come due. The failure of the feature had nothing to do with the quality of the code.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. When a developer wants to check-in code, this is a very scary moment.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. My experience is in Enterprise Software - where we are forced to chunk features into formal releases. Thanks Eric, great blog! Thank you. I know it's going to help me immensely! August 13, 2009 3:43 AM Robert said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Your natural tendency when an investor says yes will be to relax and go back to writing code. Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

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

MAY 31, 2010

Sean Murphy has an excellent and comprehensive roundup of resources about the conference: all of the slides, videos, summaries, notes and write-ups are listed on his blog here. You can read the rest of his posts on his blog : Introduction , Part 1 , Part 2.) And a special thanks is due to all of our presenters, panelists, and mentors.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

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.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

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. In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability.

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San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

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

MAY 7, 2009

To illustrate this point, I want to excerpt a large part of a recent blog post by Owen Rogers, who organized my recent trip to Vancouver. Getting features and fixes into hands of users was the greatest priority - a test environment would just get in the way and slow down the validation coming from having code running in production.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

crowdSPRING Blog

APRIL 13, 2011

In France, the decline was – 4% [link]. Legal Contracts for Software Developers Who Hate Contracts (w/free contract template tco use today) – [link]. What You Need to Know About Agile UX – [link]. An Interview With Twitter’s Forgotten Founder, Noah Glass – [link].

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Social Media Small Business Design Media 91

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development. Labels: agile , customer development 5comments: William Pietri said. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible. Great post!

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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. Would you be willing to link to the Master Class info page from your blog?

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

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. And like feedback on a simple microphone sound system, this would occasionally boil over into screeching.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

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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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

mashable.com

MAY 9, 2011

When making technical hires, we always reach out to our network of programmer friends and ask them to sit in on interviews and review resumes with us. It will be important that your CTO can execute on big projects, too, hacking away to build an amazing product that is agile. Jesse Davis , Entrustet. Danny Wong , Blank Label Group, Inc.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

Over time, such teams either explode due to irreconcilable differences or dramatically slow down. As I found out to my dismay, this is a dangerous game: in many cases, you’re asking trained professionals to violate their own code of best practices, for the good of the company. Any excesses are likely to be moderated by others.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

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. This post has been removed by a blog administrator. What counts as an iteration? Expo SF (May.

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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

AUGUST 26, 2009

Im also excited to share two long-form reviews from actual attendees. Thank you @ericries for drastically altering my perception of agile startup Thank you all so much for your kind words. More recently it's skewed to software & web. Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lets start with a distinction between shipping new software to the customer, and changing the customers experience. The idea is that often you can change the customers experience without shipping them new software at all. Id like to add one extra thought to Joes thought experiment. But that doesnt make it any less important to answer.

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Code To make split-testing pervasive, it has to be incredibly easy. The only change you have to get used to as you start to code in this style, is to wrap your changes in a simple one-line condition. Now, it may be that these code examples have scared off our non-technical friends. October 4, 2008 10:33 AM Amitt Mahajan said.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

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.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example. 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. Is that a lot? Is that good?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

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. But even clicking through to see a screenshot and some reviews is incredibly time consuming, given the hundreds of apps in most categories. I cant really tell. Expo SF (May.

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Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

mashable.com

MAY 24, 2011

Choosing Between Mobile and Native Apps One of the resounding themes for mobile software developers in 2011 is the debate between building a native app or building a mobile web app. Discovery by social and webapp html5 is more agile and less icon-find-item-search. I started writing about this subject on my blog in March.

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Mobile Web Social Media Software Review 90

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Thanks to those of you who were willing to fill out the survey, I learned my net promoter score (about 25) as well as some clear other segmentation insights: about 80% of you are founders of or work at a startup, you read many of the same other blogs, and many of you would like to engage with Lessons Learned in formats and venues beyond this blog.

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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. I was very enthusiastic about IMVU, and loved their tutorials, and praised them on my blog, etc.

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