Cheap tricks for startups

Transcript

1. Cheap tricks for Startups Lanyrd.com Simon Willison @simonw Monki Gras,

   31st January 2013 http://lanyrd.com/sccqcy

2. Early-stage startup engineering is different

3. What are the quickest tools to build that provide the

   most value?

4. Cheap experimentation

5. FEATURE_FLAGS = { 'new_maps': 'Uses MapBox rather than Google', 'login_picker':

   '/signin/ page with picker', 'login_linkedin': 'Sign in with LinkedIn', # ... }

6. @login_required @flag_required('topic_tracking') def topic_track(request, slug): topic = get_object_or_404(Topic, slug=slug) #

   ... if user.has_flag('topic_enhancements'): # ...

7. <div class="secondary"> {% flag topic_tracking %} <div class="icon-feature feature-topic"> <em

   class="title">Keep exploring</em> <p class="med"><a href="/topics/"> Browse and track events by&nbsp;topic</a></p> </div> {% flagactive topic_tracking %} BETA ONLY {% endflagactive %} {% endflag %} <!-- ... --> </div>

8. Feature flags apply to individual users and/or user tags, e.g.

   alpha, beta, lanyrd-team

9. “preview” tag controls flags available on private preview.lanyrd.com (for testing

   logged-out features)

10. Feature flags help keep trunk deployable

11. Cheap deployment

12. $ fab e:live deploy $ fab e:staging target:feature/linkedin deploy

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15. Deployment should be... Easy Fast Cheap

16. Everyone deploys on their first day!

17. Read only mode

18. MySQL on EC2 PostgreSQL on SoftLayer with no downtime http://lanyrd.com/blog/2012/lanyrds-big-move/

19. Cheap analytics

20. The History table

21. Internal metrics • created_at field on EVERY table, no exceptions

    • Makes building graphs of site growth trivial • updated_at useful but not essential

22. Our report system • Reports are arbitrary calculations • Run

    daily by cron • Backfill available on date-field based reports • Points are stored in the database • Site can graph any report • We can export any report to a spreadsheet
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24. Cheap tricks Feature flags Read only mode History table Daily

    calculated reports http://lanyrd.com/sccqcy
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