Faster! Faster! Accelerate your business with blazing prototypes

[Originally presented at OSCON 2012]
Bring your ideas to life! Convince your boss to that open source development is faster and cheaper than the "safe" COTS solution they probably hate anyway. Let's investigate ways to get real-life, functional prototypes up with blazing speed. We'll look at and compare tools for truly rapid development including Python, Django, Flask, PHP, Amazon EC2 and Heroku.

Transcript

1. Faster! Faster! Accelerate your business with blazing prototypes Drew Engelson @handofdoom
2. Why am I here?
3. I’m Drew Engelson §  I work for Celerity -  “The business acceleration consultancy” -  We help get companies “unstuck” §  I help organizations decide what tech to buy or build -  National Geographic Society -  PBS -  American Diabetes Association §  Then we make it happen
4. First… a disclaimer §  I’m a Pythonista §  I’m a Djangonaut §  Blame OSCON 2006
5. Hence, a huge man-crush on JKM Photo: Jason Samsa @ Flickr
6. Cultures of stagnation
7. Risk aversion
8. Always choosing path well traveled
9. "Innovation is R&D’s job” a.k.a. Not your job
10. Dwelling on past investments
11. Over-management and review of new ideas
12. “We have too much real work to do.”
13. Cultures of Innovation Props to Josh Linkner
14. Fuel passion
15. Celebrate ideas
16. Foster autonomy
17. Encourage courage
18. Fail forward
19. Think small
20. Institutionalize this stuff
21. COTS vs. Open Source
22. “COTS is the safer choice” No one ever got fired for choosing ___________.
23. “COTS does it out of the box” That’s horse crap!
24. Photo: Daleeast @ Flickr
25. Photo: Kethera @ Flickr
26. Rapid Prototypes
27. “If only I could show you!”
28. Developers [sometimes] have good ideas Give ‘em a chance!
29. Reduce the potential cost of failure; Timebox the experiment “OK, you get 2 days”
30. The Framework Showdown
31. The challenge §  Build a simple, fully functional prototype -  A basic web service for image transformation §  Requirements -  Pass in a source image url, desired height and width -  Pull down the image to server -  Resize the image on the server -  Return derivative image
32. The challenge Photo: Tomcrenshaw @ Flickr url = http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7138/7576110858_d66eec09f5_z.jpg width = 200 height = 200
33. I’m talking REAL functional code; minimize throw away work Evolve to production
34. Surveyed a few frameworks §  PHP -  Zend -  CodeIgniter §  Python -  Django -  Flask -  Bottle §  I know, there are many other choices… Which is your favorite?
35. Compared on §  Learning curve §  Ease of bootstrapping dev environment §  Ease of development -  # of files created or touched -  # of lines written or modified -  Complexity of code §  Speed of deployment -  Need to share with others, right? §  Note: This is a very non-scientific study
36. The non-scientific results
37. $ pip install Flask requests PIL Then write ~19 lines of Python
38. import cStringIO import requests from PIL import Image from flask import Flask, request, send_file app = Flask(__name__) @app.route('/', methods=['GET', ]) def resize(): url = request.values['url'] req = requests.get(url) resource = cStringIO.StringIO(req.content) image = Image.open(resource) image = image.resize((int(request.values['w']), int(request.values['h'])), Image.ANTIALIAS) resource = cStringIO.StringIO() image.save(resource, 'JPEG') resource.seek(0) return send_file(resource, mimetype='image/jpeg') if __name__ == '__main__': app.run(debug=True)
39. Quick and easy local server Django: manage.py runserver Flask: app.run()
40. Get boilerplate out of the way!
41. Don’t trust anything that has built-in smilies J Sorry, CodeIgniter
42. How do I share it?
43. $ git push heroku master Really... does anything else matter?
44. What does this all mean?
45. Use what you know! Learning curve is biggest time suck.
46. Keep it real Don’t assume failure… this may have legs.
47. Don’t be afraid of… Failure; the unknown; the undead
48. Give ‘em a little rope… But don’t hang ‘em with it
49. Hold a few “hack days”
50. Spread knowledge; Hold sessions to share ideas I call these “mind melds”
51. Increased pace of innovation leads to…
52. Happier developers leads to…
53. Greater productivity leads to…
54. GOTO 51
55. Resources §  http://flask.pocoo.org/ §  https://www.djangoproject.com/ §  http://codeigniter.com/ §  http://bottlepy.org/ §  http://framework.zend.com/ §  Josh Linkner -  http://www.inc.com/articles/201106/josh-linkner-7-steps-to-a-culture-of-innovation.html §  I know, there are many other choices… What’s your favorite?
56. Thanks for coming! Drew Engelson - @handofdoom dengelson@celerity.com http://www.celerity.com/