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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Outside the world of hypothetical examples, its more important to make continual progress than to build the ultimate design.

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Lessons Learned: The ABCDEF's of conducting a technical interview

Startup Lessons Learned

Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out whos good is even harder. For software engineers, I think this absolutely has to be a programming problem solved on a whiteboard. I have found this quite rare in engineers. Many of us engineers are strong introverts, without fantastic people skills.

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Lessons Learned: Five Whys

Startup Lessons Learned

Its why, at my previous job, we were able to get a new engineer completely productive on their first day. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day. Let me show you what this looked like after a few years of practicing five whys in the operations and engineering teams at IMVU.

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Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, January 4, 2009 Sharding for startups The most important aspect of a scalable web architecture is data partitioning. More common is to use a one-way hashing algorithm to map the data to be accessed to one of the shards that store it. Support multiple sharding schemes. Easy to understand.

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Lessons Learned: Achieving a failure

Startup Lessons Learned

Build a world-class technology platform, with patent-pending algorithms and the ability to scale to millions of simultaneous users. Even though some aspects of the product were eventually vindicated as good ones, the underlying architecture suffered from hard-to-change assumptions. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible.