Remove Continuous Deployment Remove Open Source Remove Programming Remove Software Review
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The free software hiring advantage

Startup Lessons Learned

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. They share a common language, culture, and coding style.

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Lessons Learned: Five Whys

Startup Lessons Learned

A new bit of code contained an infinite loop! why did that code get written? Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day.

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Lessons Learned: A new version of the Joel Test (draft)

Startup Lessons Learned

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. Lets start with the original list: Do you use source control ?

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Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Amazon PostRank

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

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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Lessons Learned: Why PHP won

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 12, 2009 Why PHP won When I first learned to program on the web, Perl + CGI was the dominant platform. 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. Every change required a server restart.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

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. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. This happened quite often in the early days of IMVU.