Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

Jonathan Irwin will lead a workshop on advanced interview skills , including the different kinds of customer interviews, how to develop questions, and how to apply the answers to an actual decision around a product. Thus we reduce the risk of deployments. How do you address that?

Continuous Deployment 162

Continuous Deployment Norway Lean Analytics 162

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. Thats more than just drawing architecture diagrams, though. What made them exceptional?

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. 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.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Even though some aspects of the product were eventually vindicated as good ones, the underlying architecture suffered from hard-to-change assumptions. Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It’s important to invest in good architecture so that your website will scale once customers arrive. If you make that investment, and then customers arrive, and the site stays up, most companies will reward the people who built the architecture and, thus, prevented the scaling problems. Why do they harbor that paranoia?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

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. And this was a huge product, which took years to develop.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Wanted to add one additional note from the perspective of someone who was intimately involved in developing this system. When Eric writes, "By the time we started doing continuous integration, we had tens of thousands of lines of code, all not under test coverage." Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, January 4, 2009 Sharding for startups The most important aspect of a scalable web architecture is data partitioning. So far, this is just a summary of what all of us who have attempted to build web-scale architectures considers obvious. Support multiple sharding schemes. Easy to understand.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

Even more surprisingly, the engineering team was equally vocal about their contention that adding rounded corners would add weeks of development time to the project, which would have pushed it out way past its hard deadline, effectively killing it. The engineering team wasn’t happy either. The engineering team wasn’t happy either.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

And as Kapor himself points out, the core ideas have even older origins: The Roman architecture critic Vitruvius advanced the notion that well-designed buildings were those which exhibited firmness, commodity, and delight. Yet a huge class of modern software projects are being developed in a very different context.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a product development team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. and going into a long diatribe about how insecure the ActiveX architecture was compared to Javas pristine sandbox. what happens if we have a pipelined architecture?

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

I know them right away - we can talk high-level architecture all the way down to the bits-and-bytes of his system. When the architecture needs modifying - why do we need a meeting? Building a good application architecture is not just coding. The "just fix it" mentality is counter-productive here. Just change it.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Its an essential discipline of good software development, especially in startups. The engineering team has decided its reached a breaking point, and is taking several weeks to bring it up to modern standards, including unit tests, getting started with continuous integration , and a new MVC architecture. Doesnt that sound good?

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

You dont need to invent a new architecture, and you dont need to even build your architecture up-front. You can turn your entire application infrastructure investment into a pay-as-you-go variable cost, and bring new products to market at speeds an order of magnitude faster than just 10 years ago. yeah, its awesome.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I started my last company with 100% off-shore resources because I could never have completed Customer Development at a reasonable cost of money or regulatory burden had I employed US Citizens. Government IT solutions can be iterative, they don't have to be designed down to the last detail by architecture astronauts before implementation.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90