Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? That means knowing whats written and whats not, what the architecture can and cant support, and how long it would take to build something new. But along the way, something strange happened.

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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. You can also download our presentation, " Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth." Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

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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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

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. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below. What about a hardware business with some long-lead-time components?

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Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

He complemented their elegantly designed minicomputers and made some astute comment about their architecture (now I’m rolling my eyes, their computers were dinosaurs) and asked who were the brilliant designers. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back. I was surprised to see that they were in the room.

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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 18, 2011

and moved from delivery to architecture and developer evangelism to make sure that new hires don't have to have the same bad experiences we all had to go through until companies started appreciating the internet as a platform. If there is no talent to be found in the valley, why not hire in Europe, Asia or India?

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Europe India Hiring Engineer 139

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

When I first encountered agile software techniques, in the form of extreme programming , I thought I had found the answer. I explained it to people this way: agile lets you make the trade-offs visible to whole company, so that they can make informed choices. Even worse, agile wasnt really helping me ship higher quality software.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

The team hired only the best and the brightest. I suggested that we change the underlying architecture of our UI system so that the artists would be able to build their own UI pieces themselves and then integrate them into the product without requiring new code every time. The team hired only the best and the brightest.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

www.bothsidesofthetable.com

MAY 13, 2012

Your deepest thinkers on technology architecture are seldom good team leaders. You still have some leeway to hire above them if need be. They know how to estimate work units, how to manage the agile development process and how to get the most out of their teams. Most often they are not. Sometimes they are introverts. .”

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. You dont need to invent a new architecture, and you dont need to even build your architecture up-front. I was building a new startup in 1999, and wanted to do it right. I had heard that all great companies built their applications on Oracle.

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Hearpreneur

JANUARY 21, 2017

They do a great job at building an amazing culture, and they are able to keep a small company feel in terms of speed and agility because they keep the teams small and have basically broken the company up into a whole bunch of companies. Google is in my opinion the best big company to work at. Image Credit: Lori Cheek.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

A typical "new feature" release is, in my experience, about 80% changes to underlying APIs or architecture. Some of these benefits are shared by agile systems which have continuous integration but large batch releases, but others are unique to continuous deployment. Thats because of the anatomy of a release. I just dont believe it.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Both sides start to think of their point of view in moralistic terms: “those guys don’t see the economic value of fast action, they only care about their precious architecture diagrams&# or “those guys are sloppy and have no professional pride.&# Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Other companies accomplish this by hiring a large staff of content production experts - and get a very good result. As a result, we were able to get started more quickly, avoid writing a ton of art path tools from scratch, and even hire from within that community. Open APIs and data-oriented architecture (aka "web 2.0").

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

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. We owe a lot to this seminal document. Re-reading, I was struck by how much of it we now take for granted. Expo SF (May.

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Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

femgineer.com

JULY 18, 2010

If you’re a founder who is still trying to grasp the product roadmap and create a company vision its probably not a good time to hire an engineer. We engineers know that need to be agile in a startup and be able to scrap code and rebuild, but want we don’t want is to have a founder who manic or aimless.

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Engineer Software Review Startup Technical Review 41

Hearpreneur

SEPTEMBER 14, 2015

Not being caught up in a corporate management structure gives me the freedom and agility to be at the top of our game. I’ve taken a major risk (both financially & mentally) and surrendered my 15 year career in architecture & design, but my heart and mind are in this project every waking moment.

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Entrepreneur Fresno LLC Community 48

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 29, 2008 The ABCDEFs of conducting a technical interview I am incredibly proud of the people I have hired over the course of my career. This second objective plays no small part in allowing you to hire the best. Hiring decisions are among the most difficult, and the most critical.

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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?

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San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Duct Tape Marketing

JUNE 20, 2023

And there's a bit of a sense that digital was a bit sort of the wild west in terms of, oh, it's all about agile and people improvise the method and you can't measure things as well. Do you really have a proper agile operating model? Do you have a, a clear technology architecture with the specific set of features to it?

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Technical Review Silicon Valley Generative AI Arizona 63

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

By which they mean: Without stupid rules that assume employees are dumb or evil, without everything taking ten times longer than it should, without wall-to-wall meetings, without resorting to hiring anything less than the top 1% of the talent pool, and so on. It’s a big reason why they move quickly.

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Government Startup Cofounder Technical Support 223

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 30, 2013

For this reason, you need to hire the absolute best people you can get for managerial positions. Facebook has created a culture of agility with a philosophy to “move fast and break things.” The added bonus is that APIs lay the groundwork for the productization of internal tools. Bezos mandated that all IT assets be exposed as APIs.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you. Expo SF (May.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

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? And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Just change it.

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Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

www.readwriteweb.com

NOVEMBER 30, 2010

Cockcroft says business agility and the inability to predict capacity are the main drivers for moving to AWS. It would have also meant hiring any number of systems administrators and database managers. Netflx uses Akamai, Limelight and Level3 content delivery networks for streaming movies. Business is accelerating.

Web 56

Web Tampa Cloud API 56

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Wed never heard of five whys, and we had plenty of "agile skeptics" on the team. It seems your cluster architecture is one of the key architectural constraints making continuous deployment possible. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Expo SF (May.

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.

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San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

This is one of the most powerful aspects of web architecture, and it often gets lost in other client-server programming paradigms. As you suggest, Thought Experiment Part II is going to involve lots of changes to the classic MMO architecture that makes it more like the web. Thanks for the comments. Expo SF (May.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Someone has managed to convince themselves that they have to do their big architecture change in one fell swoop. Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down?

Product Development 68

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

css-tricks.com

JANUARY 2, 2013

Youll need to think about JavaScript architecture. chriscoyier fire incompetent devs and hire someone who can do it right from the start. Think about CSS architecture. And all too often in an agile approach, tweaks are made for business and dev requirements. chriscoyier Organize. chriscoyier Plan and prototype.

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Web Software Review Technical Review Caching 96

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Government IT solutions can be iterative, they don't have to be designed down to the last detail by architecture astronauts before implementation. You can view it at [link] September 9, 2009 3:34 PM Hamish MacDonald said. Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets. Learning is better than optimization (the local ma.

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Occam's Razor

MARCH 23, 2010

They come with legacy problems in their code and architecture that make it nearly impossible for you to do anything fast, or even do simple things like one the fly advanced segmentation – you constantly need to change the code and know everything you want to analyze up front. If you can try to hire an independent external consultant.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Hire the absolute best and the brightest, true experts in their fields, who in turn can hire the smartest people possible to staff their departments. By hiring experts, conducting lots of focus groups, and executing to a detailed plan, the company became deluded that it knew what customers wanted. Once again, a fantastic post.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

Update: The end is near, Expensify is hiring a.NET programmer! As you might know, we’re hiring the best programmers in the world. If you are a startup looking to hire really excellent people, take notice of.NET on a resume, and ask why it’s there. Expensify Blog. Expense Reports That Don't Suck. Sjoerd Franken.

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Java PHP Software Review Coder 107

sivers.org

JUNE 25, 2010

Derek Sivers about me blog books email list contact How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen 2010-06-19 Do you have an idea for a website, online business, or application, but need a programmer to turn that idea into reality? Say, “We are hiring a developer to create only the beginning of an application. Hire one from each.

CTO Hire 84

CTO Hire Hiring Software Review Technical Review 84

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

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. On the other, they already have a team fully engaged on making their product architecture better. Expo SF (May.

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