Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim."

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

I was building a new startup in 1999, and wanted to do it right. So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. Meanwhile, we were building our app in PHP, using a generic DB driver and mysql, "for the time being." I had heard that all great companies built their applications on Oracle.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2008

I know some of those compilers are no longer available (some are hosted, others are not), so I took the liberty of putting up a copy of the PHP Greasemonkey Compiler. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? As I make more, youll find them (with source) at my Greasemonkey Compiler page.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

This gets me into trouble, because it conjures up for some the idea that product development is simply a rote mechanical exercise of linear optimization. You just constantly test little micro-changes and follow a hill-climbing algorithm to build your product. They just ask "which hypothesis should I show?"

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

As the product matured, they were able to ratchet up the quality to prevent regression on features that had been truly embraced by their customers. Second, leveraging a dynamic scripting language (like PHP) for building web applications made it easy to quickly set up a simple, non-disruptive deployment process.

Continuous Deployment 131

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

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. But by the time I was building my first websites for commercial use , PHP had taken over. Writing unit tests or mock objects in PHP is an exercise in constant frustration.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166