From no code to a profitable business

It took us four years to grow from an ambitious idea to a profitable business, with a small team and not a lot of resources. I'll tell you how making "just enough" and "good enough", with a fine mix of various best practices, a lot motivation and some Ruby, we've managed to build a fast-growing product and a happy company.

The video is available on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8hH_5LKrQY

A french version is available : https://speakerdeck.com/jlecour/dune-feuille-blanche-a-une-affaire-rentable

Transcript

1. From no line of code to a profitable business The one where we don’t have to be perfect to succeed RuLu 2013, June 20-21
2. Look ma’, I speak at a conference
3. WWAPD?
4. great models, but hard to reach when you begin
5. 4 years small team big goals
6. from a prototype to many applications
7. we haven’t been perfect but we won anyway
8. with great people you can do great things
9. Jérémy Lecour hotelhotel.com
10. this team is too small to do anything significant
11. No world-class expert No money to hire some Do all the things by yourself
12. 4 roles main in the developer’s job
13. architect
14. builder
15. rocket surgeon
16. firefighter
17. you can wear any of those hats but switching all the time if exhausting
18. WORKING IS HARD LET’S GO SHOPPING! DEAL WITH IT
19. imperfect everywhere is better than very bad anywhere iOS 7 style Comic Sans MS
20. frequent changes in technologies use what you need now, change it later (if needed)
21. with a good background you can make quick and educated choices
22. we’ve changed the data store and it’s not that bad 3x
23. hotels are sold by many merchants at different prices
24. 2,100 hotels, 17 merchants 30 external requests 20K prices saved by 15 threads 30-90 seconds to complete a search for PARIS :
25. at first MySQL was easy and did the job
26. then it was no longer a good fit too much work on lots of data
27. MongoDB documents { "search_results": [ { "hotel": { "name": "Sofitel Marseille", "rating": 4, }, "merchants": { "accor": 145.20, "expedia": 150.00, "ratestogo": "full" } },{ "hotel": { "name": "Radisson Blu", "rating": 4, }, "merchants": { "hotelclub": 150.00, "expedia": 154.00, "booking": "full" } } ] }
28. under bigger load MongoDB freaked out too
29. -5ms ➘ +250ms database locked 99%
30. some optimization helped for a while
31. if you #fail spectacularly hopefully you can rollback
32. ElasticSearch very fast indexing database awesome REST API
33. experience & knowledge are gained along the way
34. learning and sharing all the f•••ing time
35. #TGIF LET’S GO LEARNING
36. conferences local user groups code-retreats, coding-dojos open-source contributions explore, meet, share
37. have people who care for the team, the product and the craft
38. passionate value the result more than being at your desk
39. self-driven You manage things, You lead people. Grace Murray Hopper aka. Grandma COBOL
40. self-driven micro-management is a waste of time
41. open-minded different background and expectations bring new perspectives and better solutions
42. an {A,a}gile attitude … well, kinda, sorta
43. cherry picking FTW! Scrum, XP, Kanban, Lean, …
44. No formal stand-up meetings we all know each other’s status BUT
45. WE DON’T ALWAYS DO PAIR-PROGRAMMING BUT WHEN WE DO, IT’S FOR knowledge sharing critical code and fun
46. a small team can move rapidly
47. Git-flow simplified we’ve adopted
48. change doesn’t need global approval we try, then keep or ditch new tools and practices all the time
49. Don’t break the team’s dynamics Refine processes incrementally
50. empirical: based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. empiricism: the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses.
51. we are not a model we could have done better
52. have great goals improve gradually
53. 4 years intense highly rewarding thanks to awesome people
54. Dave Thomas RailsConf 2010 You don't have to be perfect, you just have to survive. And along the way, remember that the reason you're doing it, is to make it fun.
55. Thank You with a special to Fabien Catteau
56. jeremy.lecour@gmail.com @jlecour jeremy.wordpress.com github.com/jlecour