In Praise of Smallness

My talk at the 2014 BigRuby conference in Dallas, TX.

Getting big things done is important. We praise big accomplishments, but those involved can usually point to the small decisions and actions along the way that made it all possible. Structuring teams, projects, systems, and processes to embrace smallness enables the big things to evolve and succeed. This talk will cover ways in which the teams behind TripCase have succeeded and failed while making big things happen one small step at a time.

Transcript

1. In Praise of Smallness
6. 3:00
7. 9:00
9. CAPITAL EXPENDITURE END TO END CAPACITY PLANNING ENTERPRISE GOVERNANCE OPERATIONAL RUN BOOK DATABASE SHARDING DISASTER RECOVERY PCI COMPLIANCE
10. http://www.flickr.com/photos/90425101@N00/8722350677
11. 3:00
12. B.J. Allen
14. https://cml.music.utexas.edu Robert Duke Director, Center for Music Learning Butler School of Music The University of Texas at Austin
18. “students ... were randomly assigned to be quizzed at one of two frequencies – monthly or semimonthly. The group quizzed twice a month outperformed the less frequently quizzed group […] on both an end-of-semester examination and a delayed recall test administered 3 months later” (Kalaf & Hanna, 1992) “we examined whether low-stakes testing (quizzing) can be used to foster students’ learning ...Quizzing produced significant learning benefits, with between 13% and 25% gains in performance on summative unit examinations.” (Pennebaker, Gosling & Ferell, 2013)
22. Approval Mistakes
25. Negative ! != ! Negative
26. Negative Feedback Must Be: • Accurate • Contextually appropriate • Delivered without emotion
28. 3.0.21???
29. → 3.0 3.1
30. → 3.1 3.2
36. http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1833567 When a release engineering team spends a weekend in a data center deploying the last three months' work, the last thing anybody wants to do is deploy again any time soon. – Jez Humble
38. Upgrading all […] components in one big-bang release is the highest-risk way to roll out new functionality. Instead, deploy components independently. ! Database changes can also be rolled out incrementally. Principle 1: Low-Risk Releases Are Incremental
40. Deployment is what happens when you install some version of your software into a particular environment. ! Release is when you make a system or some part of it (for example, a feature) available to users. Principle 2: Decouple Deployment and Release
43. When you deploy to production more often, you're practicing the deployment process more often. ! When you're deploying more frequently, working out what went wrong is much easier because the amount of change is much smaller. Principle 3: Focus on Reducing Batch Size
44. Story is almost done rush it wait forever* *not really forever
45. Story is almost done wait a short time* *really a short time rush it
48. Thank You!
49. @bjallen