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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

What does your Chief Technology Officer do all day? 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. Just what is the CTO supposed to do?

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Lessons Learned: Just-In-Time Scalability

Startup Lessons Learned

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. You can also download our presentation, " Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth." Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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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.

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Waves of technology platforms

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 8, 2008 Waves of technology platforms I still remember the first time I switched to LAMP. That startup didnt turn out so well, but not for lack of technology. You dont need to invent a new architecture, and you dont need to even build your architecture up-front. Expo SF (May.

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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Yet other agile principles suggest the opposite, as in YAGNI and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork. Reconciling these principles requires a little humility.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

The six key attributes spell ABCDEF: Agility. When talking about their past experience, candidates with agility will know why they did what they did in a given situation. To probe for agility, you have to ask the candidate questions involving something that they know little about. At the time, I was a die-heard Java zealot.