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Tom Wilson
April 02, 2014
Programming
130
1
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Application Development
In Pursuit of Developer Happiness
Tom Wilson
April 02, 2014
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Transcript
Application Development Pursuit of Developer Happiness
About Me ! Tom Wilson ! Chief Technologist,
Jack Russell Software ! A division of CareKinesis, Inc ! Building Applications and Development Teams for 15+ years
None
Experience I have made more mistakes I have tried to
learn from them
I want to create an application that is just as
easy to maintain as it is to create
long road no silver bullet
Three Approaches
Approach 1
BDUF ! Review all systems in the market !
Bring users from each system to provide features ! Use new platform ! Set unreasonable goals ! Add developers as needed
result
System of Systems ! Complex difficult to !
Support ! Maintain ! Upgrade
Approach 2
Waterfall to Agile ! Started with complex Data Model
! New Web based interface ! New Dev Environment ! Small Team ! Implement and ship incrementally
Success! kind of
Results > SOA ! Complex ! easier to
support ! easier to upgrade ! still hard to develop ! tightly coupled components
Approach 3
Agile to Waterfall ! Launch MVP ! Continuous
Deployment ! PAAS ! Extreme Programming ! OpenSource Stack
Awesome
Too Extreme! ! Users wanted slower pace !
batch features ! more stability ! more process
Enter Waterfall But we still called it Agile!
“Afraid to admit we are Waterfall”
we are awesome!
results ! huge backlog ! easy to support
! easy to upgrade ! painful to develop
Lessons Learned
avoid configuration as much as possible
clearly define your features Know your user
App Analytics ! mixpanel ! kissmetrics !
new relic
Loosely Coupled
Events, APIs and Bots ! activity stream !
trigger tasks from activities ! Http/json
Think in terms of Applets and Components
build a collection of apps
Applets and Bots
Our New Approach ! Quarterly Goals ! 2
week sprints ! javascript everywhere ! connect devs with stakeholders ! PAAS
2 week sprint ! 2 days planning – redact
stories to product team ! 4 days dev ! 2 days code review ! 2 days qa
Javascript Everywhere ! AngularJS ! NodeJS !
Npm ! Browserify ! CouchDb
Devs should be involved from concept to completion
PAAS Dev should have their own personal playground to explore
and share concepts
Prototype to Production
Just do it Do it Fast Do it better
Prototype ! Bootstrap ! AngularJs ! Firebase
or PouchDb ! Collaborate RealTime
Early Adopter ! Sames as Prototype ! Add
NoSql Backend Mongo, CouchDb ! NodeJs ! Clearly Separate Concerns ! Bots and Job Queue
MainStream ! convert to Applets and components !
Focus on Polish and Usability ! Product Boundaries ! Measure Everything ! Formalize Schemas {sql}
Dev Goals ! Design in Real-Time (if possible) !
Applets and Bots - Microservices ! Flexibility and Durability ! Javascript everywhere, until necessary
Thank You @twilson63