Artisinal Software Manufacturing

How to grow an engineering team without losing a culture of craft. Note that I ignored all of the speaker notes when giving the actual presentation.

Transcript

1. Artisanal Software Manufacturing (No metaphors were harmed in the creation of this presentation.) Friday, February 1, 13 Growth inevitably encourages an industrial approach, how do we avoid losing craft in the process?
2. Let’s confront our preconceived notions Friday, February 1, 13
3. Handcrafted Treasures versus Mass Produced Crap Friday, February 1, 13 Mass production is often equated with low quality
4. Friday, February 1, 13 In America, this is what we think of when we think of mass production
5. Friday, February 1, 13 The dollar store, tons of cheap junk at very affordable prices
6. Friday, February 1, 13 Apple has sold over 100 million of these
7. Friday, February 1, 13 Here’s a mass produced product people like
8. Friday, February 1, 13 Handmade Japanese chef’s knife, $900 on Etsy http://www.etsy.com/listing/115201436/tsubaya-stainless-steel-powder-layer-16
9. Friday, February 1, 13 LAX desk, $4350 on Etsy -- moss design in Chicago http://www.etsy.com/listing/101087003/reclaimed-mid-century-modern-wood-and
10. Friday, February 1, 13 Cute, but ...
11. Friday, February 1, 13 Expensive and hated
12. Craft and mass production are value-neutral Friday, February 1, 13
13. Craft maximizes the skill and creativity of the individual artisan Friday, February 1, 13
14. Mass production optimizes for predictability and repeatability Friday, February 1, 13 Neither are without their downsides
15. Mass production can make us faceless drones Friday, February 1, 13
16. Friday, February 1, 13 Most people don’t want their job to feel like this \
17. Heroism doesn’t scale Friday, February 1, 13
18. Friday, February 1, 13 Anthony Bourdain in “Medium Raw” “Hire more people like Justo” is not a strategy
19. Friday, February 1, 13 The elephant in the room: in software development we don’t make things over and over. Everything is “hand crafted.” Writing code is more like building factories than working in one
20. Software is both a set of instructions for a computer and a document written for other humans Friday, February 1, 13 Here’s how I put software in this context
21. Industrial practices apply to the first purpose, craft applies to the second. Friday, February 1, 13
22. The question: How do we grow without forgetting about craft? Friday, February 1, 13
23. The formula (not perfected) Friday, February 1, 13 Lots of industrial practices to create room for craftsmanship
24. Software development, the industrial parts Friday, February 1, 13 1. process monitoring 2. automation 3. interchangeable parts
25. Process Monitoring: Throughput Friday, February 1, 13 The fundamental engineering question is, have we built a system that supports Etsy’s throughput. From the right side of the graph, you can see the answer is “not always”
26. Process Monitoring: Performance Friday, February 1, 13 Load time for the top 5 pages at etsy.com. You can’t optimize without measurement.
27. Process Monitoring: Exceptions Friday, February 1, 13 Any industrial process seeks to minimize exceptions while acknowledging that they cannot be eliminated. We do the same thing in software.
28. Process Monitoring: A/B Tests Friday, February 1, 13 Deciding what to try is craft, determining whether it worked is math
29. Automation: Developer setup Friday, February 1, 13 Every developer has a virtual machine with their development environment set up and the Etsy code checked out on day one.
30. Automation: Continuous integration Friday, February 1, 13 We use Hudson, like most everyone else. We have a very robust set of tests. Unit tests, functional tests, static analysis, and style checks.
31. Automation: Deployment Friday, February 1, 13 Running pre-production tests and pushing to the pre-production environment requires one button push. Pushing to production requires another.
32. Interchangeable Parts Friday, February 1, 13 At Etsy, our goal is to keep our stack simple so that developers can be interchangeable parts -- reducing the friction when moving between teams or projects. This pays dividends that I’ll talk about shortly
33. Software development, the crafty parts Friday, February 1, 13 What do engineers at Etsy do to make code better for the other engineers?
34. Craftsmanship: Code reviews Friday, February 1, 13 1. Developers learn by being reviewed 2. Developers learn by reviewing 3. Exposure to more code always helps 4. People get accustomed to constructive criticism
35. Craftsmanship: Bootcamps Friday, February 1, 13 1. New devs -- meet people, learn how teams work, see some code 2. Developers enjoy it, ask to boot camp periodically 3. Senior Boot Camps -- one month boot camp on your annual hire date 4. SPOF insurance
36. Craftsmanship: Bootcamps Friday, February 1, 13 1. New devs -- meet people, learn how teams work, see some code 2. Developers enjoy it, ask to boot camp periodically 3. Senior Boot Camps -- one month boot camp on your annual hire date 4. SPOF insurance
37. Craftsmanship: Bootcamps Friday, February 1, 13 1. New devs -- meet people, learn how teams work, see some code 2. Developers enjoy it, ask to boot camp periodically 3. Senior Boot Camps -- one month boot camp on your annual hire date 4. SPOF insurance
38. Craftsmanship: Bug rotation Friday, February 1, 13 1. Bugs on features not in active development are pooled 2. Several developers are on bug rotation every day 3. Goal is to get people to work with new people and work on new code 4. Teams can focus on new projects rather than on their bug queue
39. Craftsmanship: Code readers Friday, February 1, 13 1. One person selects code, not necessarily from Etsy 2. Just like a book club, everyone reads it 3. We have a discussion 4. We build some consensus around “good code”
40. The counterfactual? Friday, February 1, 13 Scaling up process rather than automation
41. Friday, February 1, 13 It’s inevitable that your company feels more and more like this as it grows
42. Friday, February 1, 13 You want your developers to feel like this
43. Measure everything that can be quantified Friday, February 1, 13
44. Automate any process that doesn’t involve craftsmanship Friday, February 1, 13
45. Use the time you save to spread the values of craft through your organization Friday, February 1, 13
46. Thanks! codeascraft.etsy.com follow me on twitter: @rafeco Friday, February 1, 13