Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. The same might be said of good software. Here we have the beginnings of a theory of design for software.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was the junior guy on a project team; I was called in to do some technical due diligence for reasons that were obscure to me, because the team already had much more senior engineers assigned to it. As a technical fix, it was brilliant. I remember one such meeting vividly. So they react in two ways.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 2, 2008 Paul Graham on fundraising I have found no better primer on the current realities of starting a new technology company in a startup hub like Silicon Valley than Paul Grahams essays. Your natural tendency when an investor says yes will be to relax and go back to writing code.

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San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

And a special thanks is due to all of our presenters, panelists, and mentors. Kent Beck is deservedly famous for his many contributions in the software industry. Although many of the non-technical folks in the room didnt understand what was happening in the moment, plenty of hackers were on high alert. We all owe you.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. For software, the easiest batch to see is code. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work. This is easiest to see in deployment.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. When a developer wants to check-in code, this is a very scary moment.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 15, 2008 The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time Split-testing is a core lean startup discipline, and its one of those rare topics that comes up just as often in a technical context as in a business-oriented one when Im talking to startups. First of all, why split-test?

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, May 14, 2009 The Lean Startup Workshop - now an OReilly Master Class My rate of posting has been much lower lately, and this is mostly due to preparations for the upcoming Lean Startup Workshop on May 29. I watched the OReilly webinar and would love to see more. May 14, 2009 5:23 AM David said.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. But the same technologies that make life difficult for traditional marketers also offer them unprecedented new opportunities.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

See Paul Grahams Why Nerds are Unpopular to learn more) Take a look at this article on a programming Q&A site: How old are you, and how old were you when you started coding? We also learned that law is code , and that leadership was needed to build thriving communities in a digital age. Its this second point I want to emphasize.

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Im also excited to share two long-form reviews from actual attendees. Thank you @ericries for drastically altering my perception of agile startup Thank you all so much for your kind words. Technically you argue it goes back 30 years when StorageTek was founded. More recently it's skewed to software & web.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

A new bit of code contained an infinite loop! why did that code get written? Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. Especially for a startup, not taking maximum advantage of free software is crazy.

Software Review 68

Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. When I want to know about some concurrency issues between services in his cluster, he doesnt blink an eye when I suggest we get the source code and take a look. He throws off volumes of code, and it works. All is not lost, though.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Part-Time VPE 94

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Our code pushes take another six minutes. Since these two steps are pipelined that means at peak we’re pushing a new revision of the code to the website every nine minutes. On average we deploy new code fifty times a day. Code reviews and pairing Great practices. Throwing out a lot of code.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

NZ Entrepreneur

MARCH 11, 2020

Tech-savvy and with more options than you can shake a stick at, today’s emerging talent-pool knows that they’ll be changing careers as often as a four-year old changes their dress-up clothes. It’s about becoming more agile. 1) Sales Talent. 2) Business Authenticity. Life as we know it is constantly changing. 5) Outbound Sales.

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Social Media Channel Technical Review Sales 64

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

That’s because Five Whys will often pierce the illusion of separate departments and discover the human problems that lurk beneath the surface of supposedly technical problems. But if we stay stuck at the technical parts of the problem, and never uncover the human problems behind them, we’re not going far enough.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. My experience is in Enterprise Software - where we are forced to chunk features into formal releases. Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what. Thank you. I know it's going to help me immensely!

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Due to an interaction effect between your hardware, solar flares, and quantum flux, this virus will crash your computer and erase your hard drive sometime soon. In the past, we invested in brilliant architecture, code reuse, refactoring, modular design, etc. In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

Over time, such teams either explode due to irreconcilable differences or dramatically slow down. As I found out to my dismay, this is a dangerous game: in many cases, you’re asking trained professionals to violate their own code of best practices, for the good of the company. Any excesses are likely to be moderated by others.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lets start with a distinction between shipping new software to the customer, and changing the customers experience. The idea is that often you can change the customers experience without shipping them new software at all. Its design goals arent geared towards efficiency in terms of technical costs.

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

From a technical point of view, its amazing. All I see is a name, an icon, a price, the developers name, and a review star-rating. The reviews are all over the map. But even clicking through to see a screenshot and some reviews is incredibly time consuming, given the hundreds of apps in most categories. Expo SF (May.

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Build a world-class technology platform, with patent-pending algorithms and the ability to scale to millions of simultaneous users. Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development.

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San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. Every change required a server restart.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

In fact, I am convinced that if you could find some of IMVU’s earliest adopters, they would say something like this: “sure, those guys at IMVU HQ were helpful in writing code and stuff, but in the end they were just the hired help. peer review is NOT working. It was really the community who built that product.&#

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Community Management Lean Software Review 158