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. Expo SF (May.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. You can follow some of that debate here and here ; I continue to believe that this idea is correct.

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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. Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. I dont think so.

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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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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

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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Your natural tendency when an investor says yes will be to relax and go back to writing code. 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? Expo SF (May.

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Continuous deployment and continuous learning At long last, some of the actual implementers of the advanced systems we built at IMVU for rapid deployment and rapid response are starting to write about it. Our code pushes take another six minutes.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Im also excited to share two long-form reviews from actual attendees. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. Thank you @ericries for drastically altering my perception of agile startup Thank you all so much for your kind words. Articulate, inspirational. Expo SF (May.

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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.

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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

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.

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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?

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 16, 2009 Continuous deployment with downloads One of my goals in writing posts about topics like continuous deployment is the hope that people will take those ideas and apply them to new situations - and then share what they learn with the rest of us.

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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. We changed our model to B2B and adopted Agile around 2002. May 15, 2009 5:59 PM Eric said.

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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?

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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.

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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. Expo SF (May.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

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.

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Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. My experience is in Enterprise Software - where we are forced to chunk features into formal releases. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what.

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Due to an interaction effect between your hardware, solar flares, and quantum flux, this virus will crash your computer and erase your hard drive sometime soon. In the past, we invested in brilliant architecture, code reuse, refactoring, modular design, etc. In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability.

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San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

This is precisely the dilemma that the doctrine of minimum viable product is designed to solve. Over time, such teams either explode due to irreconcilable differences or dramatically slow down. Lean manufacturing , agile software development , and Theory of Constraints are all examples of this idea in action.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

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. By the time a tops-down company-wide review figured out the main problems, they’d have shifted to another location.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

I believe it is a full, company-wide turn through the OODA loop (for a software business, see especially Ideas-Code-Learn ). You need a process for systematically reviewing your costs and eliminating those that slow you down. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. What counts as an iteration?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

At IMVU , these were quite common (after all, were shipping code 50 times a day). They are collected and reviewed after an appropriate interval (e.g. In response to Sean - Intel still runs a very formal process of setting expectations, evaluating employees and reviewing progress on a quarterly basis. love your openness at IMVU.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

All I see is a name, an icon, a price, the developers name, and a review star-rating. The reviews are all over the map. But even clicking through to see a screenshot and some reviews is incredibly time consuming, given the hundreds of apps in most categories. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

I had a lot of use for this concept back when I worked on game design and virtual worlds. In order to maintain game play balance, game designers have to take into account the needs of customers who have an excess of four different assets: time , money , skill , and passion. Having a balanced ecosystem is what game designers strive for.

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usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

A good answer to this question should really include all of the following: I have both development and design time scheduled for quick follow up work on the feature over the next few sprints. My code base can be changed or refactored to support major changes to the feature. Use the code “LAURAK&# for 20% off your ticket price!

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

The credit is due to much smarter people than me, and to the incredible power of necessity, that mother of invention. Some products, like Habbo Hotel or World of Warcraft, employ professional artists and designers to create compelling virtual goods that players want to buy. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Insist on high levels of usability, UI design, and polish. Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development. Labels: agile , customer development 5comments: William Pietri said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

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. When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. Every change required a server restart.

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PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

In fact, I am convinced that if you could find some of IMVU’s earliest adopters, they would say something like this: “sure, those guys at IMVU HQ were helpful in writing code and stuff, but in the end they were just the hired help. or their privileging of only certain designers featured in Showcase and promos.

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