Cheap tricks for Startups

Lanyrd.com

Simon Willison @simonwMonki Gras, 31st January 2013

http://lanyrd.com/sccqcy

Early-stagestartup engineering

is different

What are the quickest tools to

build that provide the most value?

Cheap experimentation

FEATURE_FLAGS = { 'new_maps': 'Uses MapBox rather than Google', 'login_picker': '/signin/ page with picker', 'login_linkedin': 'Sign in with LinkedIn', # ...}

@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'): # ...

<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>

Feature flags applyto individual users

and/or user tags, e.g.alpha, beta, lanyrd-team

“preview” tag controls flags available on private

preview.lanyrd.com(for testing logged-out

features)

Feature flags help keep trunk deployable

Cheap deployment

$ fab e:live deploy

$ fab e:staging target:feature/linkedin deploy

Deployment should be...

EasyFastCheap

Everyone deployson their first day!

Read only mode

MySQLon EC2

PostgreSQLon SoftLayer

with no downtime

http://lanyrd.com/blog/2012/lanyrds-big-move/

Cheap analytics

The History table

Internal metrics

• created_at field on EVERY table, no exceptions

• Makes building graphs of site growth trivial

• updated_at useful but not essential

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

Cheap tricksFeature flagsRead only modeHistory tableDaily calculated reports

http://lanyrd.com/sccqcy