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

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. Bring your questions.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

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.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. To his credit are Extreme Programming , jUnit, patterns, TDD , the list goes on. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. To his credit are Extreme Programming , jUnit, patterns, TDD , the list goes on. Bring your questions.

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Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features. He published our first wiki where the whole list of potential features were outlined. He’s a smart guy.

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Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

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

These specs are handed to a designer, who builds layouts and mockups of all the salient points. Then the designs are handed to a team of programmers with various specialties. Each specialist takes up his part of the spec (UI, middleware, backend) and cranks out code. First, he writes it nice and clear.

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San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 23, 2013

This is especially true when designing a great product. What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 4 (Collaborative Design) of Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden The most effective way I’ve found to rally a team around a design direction is through collaboration.

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Lean Software Review Wiki Design 167

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. I dont think so.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 23, 2010

And to give credit where it’s due (in addition to the content that Fred producers) a lot of the discussion works well because of the Disqus commenting platform. Only later did I realize that this was part of Dharmesh Shah’s larger blog and that the software was based on the popular “stack overflow&# software.

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Silicon Valley Pre-Money Valuation Technical Review Software Review 301

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

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company Ive even heard about. Dates are irrelevant. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco.

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Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

ConversionXL

JANUARY 12, 2017

When sites are designed, developed and written with web accessibility in mind, everyone has equal access to online information, products, and opportunities. For example, a key principle of Web accessibility is designing Web sites and software that are flexible to meet different user needs, preferences, and situations.

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Web Software Review Technical Review Canada 48

Feld Thoughts

JUNE 22, 2012

I’m a huge fan of William and his writing as you can see from my review of his book Avogadro Corp. There seem to be two schools of thought on how to predict the future of information technology: looking at software or looking at hardware. By day he works on web and social media for HP. Take a look – and take your time.

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Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Bandwidth Software Review 182

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 2, 2008

Your natural tendency when an investor says yes will be to relax and go back to writing code. Lean Startup Wiki - including a complete list of local meetups and meetup organizers. When an investor says he wants to invest in you, or an acquirer says they want to buy you, dont believe it till you get the check. Bring your questions.

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San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

dontbesoanalytical.blogspot.com

MAY 13, 2012

Consider how firms today confront Web 2.0 – the combination of blogs, wikis, and social networking technologies sprouting up. Of course, this draconian measure does not work; employees can blog under another name, or contribute to a wiki pseudonymously. But if it’s wrong, the CTO has solid documentation to review.

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CTO Technical Review Technology Software Review 40

Software By Rob

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

My Experience Back in 2002/2003 I spent hours writing a sales letter and emailing it to 15 local design firms, offering my services as an outsourced development staff (I coded in PHP,NET and Java at the time). I increased by rate nearly 30% in 3 months due to the amount of work coming my way. 3 Rob on 09.29.09

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Software Review Developer RSS Software Developers 53

bizthoughts.mikelee.org

MARCH 8, 2012

Active software engineers probably get two offers a month or more. I was able to hire phenomenal software engineers and grow a strong team culture. Learn to write code yourself. link] # 4 hours ago Going #lean and testing with imagemaps, cuz concepts are cheap and code is expensive. # YHOO ) in its second act.

Technical Cofounder 40

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 40

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. The meeting was tense.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The new design improved on the old one in several ways, but these improvements didnt translate all the way through the funnel. Usually, I think that means youve lost some good aspect of the old design. The designers might be telling you that the new design looks much better than the old one, and thats probably true.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

And a special thanks is due to all of our presenters, panelists, and mentors. Kent Beck is deservedly famous for his many contributions in the software industry. Unfortunately, the video of our sllconf conversation is not online (due to technical problems), but we have a physical tape backup which we are endeavoring to get online soon.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

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.

Customer Development 166

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

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?

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

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

AUGUST 26, 2009

Im also excited to share two long-form reviews from actual attendees. And one last specific practice that came up at this session: feverishaaron : UI, design and programmers are all in the same department, all have the same title, and all are evaluated the same. More recently it's skewed to software & web.

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San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

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.

Software Review 68

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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.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

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?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

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.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

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

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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Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

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.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

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? Five Whys is designed to avoid these nebulous arguments. We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. In fact, at IMVU, we did exactly that.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

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. Users were not just an extension of the testing team - they were an extension of the product design team. Heres the key point.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

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. Bring your questions.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

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. Its design goals arent geared towards efficiency in terms of technical costs.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68