Software Engineering in Startups

@dusanoTSstartup, 2012-10-23

mag. Dušan Omerčević, UDI RIVP of Engineering @zemanta

@dusanodusan.omercevic@zemanta.comrestreaming.wordpress.comlinkedin.com/in/dusanomercevicgithub.com/dusanoskram.si

Outline

• 15:10 – 16:00 Engineering in Startups• 16:10 – 17:00 Tools• 17:10 – 18:00 Technology• 18:10 – 19:00 Growing Systems• 19:00 - Beer(hunt)

Engineering in Startups

Build the right productvs.

build the product right?

Product Discovery

Google's Way

Source: http://www.quietaction.com/blog/inspired-d3-talk-tom-chi.html

Source: http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/web/for-a-future-friendly-web/

Great Companies build Great Products

CourageRespect

CommunicationCommitment

Focus

Yishan's WayYishan Wong, CEO of Reddit, Director of Engineering at

Facebook, Senior Engineering Manager at PayPal(http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management.html)

1. Make hiring your number one priority, always!

2. Let process be implemented by those who practice it

3. Promotion from within4. Tools are top priority5. Technical Leaders

PM 101

1. Product Owner & Product Backlog2. Retrospectives3. Team & Scrum master4. Daily stand-up meeting & Demos

5. Iterations (Scrum & XP) or limited work-in-progress (Kanban)

Tools

Collaboration Tools

• In person meetings & Whiteboard

Collaboration Tools #2

• Trello

• Google Apps

Collaboration Tools #3

• IRC

• Blog!

Collaboration Tools #4

• Code style guidelines• Git• Code reviews– see Code reviews at Khan for guidelines

Continuous Deployment

• Make Deployment a non-event• If something is painfull, do it more often until

the pain goes away!• Ideal: the new employee should be able to

deploy on the first day!• Prerequisite: Unittests & TDD• Dark releases, Blue-green deployment, Canary

releasing

Technology

VC warning!The core business of startups is

searching for a repeatable and scalable business model and not playing with

(unreliable) technology!

Operation System

There's only one!

Programming Languages

• JavaScript• Java• PHP• Python• C/C++

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_most_popular_websites

Measure Anything, Measure Everything

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/

Measuring as Testing

• Unittests are only run upon deploy, not periodically

• You should have HealthChecks for all your applications, that are run upon deploy and then periodically

• Have error inducing functionality to test your error detection functionality

Storage & Data Processing

• PostgreSQL vs. MySQL• MySQL vs. Cassandra– The Immutable state of MySQL

• Hadoop/Hive• Splunk• Lucene/Solr• RabbitMQ

Storage Latencies

• Memcached: <1 ms (mainly network latency)• Cassandra: ~1 ms• Oracle for simple queries: 1-5 ms• DynamoDB: ~5 ms• SimpleDB: >10 ms

Cloud Computing

AWS: EC2 Large instance (4 EC2 compute units/virtual cores, 7.5 GB RAM memory, 850 GB storage)• On-demand: 250

euro/month• Reserved: 600 euro + 35

euro/month• Spot: 15 euro/month

HetznerQuad-Core i7-2600, 16 GB RAM, 2 x 3 TB disk: • 50 euro/month

Amazon Web Services

• Cloudfront ($0.12 / GB / month)• Elastic MapReduce• DynamoDB• S3 ($0.12 / GB / month)• Glacier ($0.01 / GB / month)• Mechanical Turk• Alexa Web Information Service

Growing Systems

Estimates in Software Development

• 1 minute -> 2 hours (120x)• 1 hour -> 2 days (48x)• 1 day -> 2 weeks (14x)• 1 week -> 2 months (8x)• 1 month -> 2 years (24x)• 1 year -> forever (infinity)

Programming in Startups

• Code is Liability• Supporting Throw Away Software• Don't be afraid of the if statement!• Develop mainly in master branch• Use feature toggles

Availability

• 99% ~ 3 days• 99.9% ~ 9 hours• 99.99% ~ 1 hour• 99.999% ~ 5 minutesof downtime/year!

Optimize also for MTTR not just MTBF!

Unittests

• A Unittest should take at most 10ms to Run• 1054 unittests covering Zemanta's code• Create mock-ups! Don't do integration testing

with unittests!

Principles of Software Documentation

1. Source code and running services are the ultimate documentation!

2. No documentation is much much better than misleading/outdated documentation!

3. Out of sight, out of mind! Documentation should be close to the source code and the running services!

4. Document only what’s absolutely necessary (data structures, development environment setup, release and deployment procedures)

5. Documentation should be part of company culture and engineering pride!

Take Home Message

• The core business of startups is searching for a repeatable and scalable business model, not technology!

• Measure Anything, Measure Everything• Do Code Reviews!• Be stupid!