Slides from a workshop on Software Engineering in Startups that Dušan Omerčević gave for the first generation of TSstartups in October 2012.

1. Software Engineering in Startups
@dusano
TSstartup, 2012-10-23

2. mag. Dušan Omerčevid, UDI RI
VP of Engineering @zemanta
@dusano
dusan.omercevic@zemanta.com
restreaming.wordpress.com
linkedin.com/in/dusanomercevic
github.com/dusano
skram.si

3. 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)

4. Engineering in Startups

5. Build the right product
vs.
build the product right?

6. Product Discovery

7. Google's Way
Source: http://www.quietaction.com/blog/inspired-d3-talk-tom-chi.html

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

9. Great Companies build
Great Products

10. Courage
Respect
Communication
Commitment
Focus

11. Yishan's Way
Yishan 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 within
4. Tools are top priority
5. Technical Leaders

12. PM 101
1. Product Owner & Product Backlog
2. Retrospectives
3. Team & Scrum master
4. Daily stand-up meeting & Demos
1. Iterations (Scrum & XP) or limited work-in-
progress (Kanban)

13. Tools

14. Collaboration Tools
• In person meetings & Whiteboard

15. Collaboration Tools #2
• Trello
• Google Apps

16. Collaboration Tools #3
• IRC
• Blog!

17. Collaboration Tools #4
• Code style guidelines
• Git
• Code reviews
– see Code reviews at Khan for guidelines

18. 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

19. Technology

20. VC warning!
The core business of startups is
searching for a repeatable and scalable
business model and not playing with
(unreliable) technology!

21. Operation System
There's only one!

22. Programming Languages
• JavaScript
• Java
• PHP
• Python
• C/C++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_most_popular_websites

23. Measure Anything, Measure Everything
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/

24. 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

25. Storage & Data Processing
• PostgreSQL vs. MySQL
• MySQL vs. Cassandra
– The Immutable state of MySQL
• Hadoop/Hive
• Splunk
• Lucene/Solr
• RabbitMQ

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

27. Cloud Computing
AWS: Hetzner
EC2 Large instance (4 EC2 Quad-Core i7-2600, 16 GB
compute units/virtual cores, RAM, 2 x 3 TB disk:
7.5 GB RAM memory, 850 GB • 50 euro/month
storage)
• On-demand: 250
euro/month
• Reserved: 600 euro + 35
euro/month
• Spot: 15 euro/month

28. 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

29. Growing Systems

31. 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)

32. 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

33. Availability
• 99% ~ 3 days
• 99.9% ~ 9 hours
• 99.99% ~ 1 hour
• 99.999% ~ 5 minutes
of downtime/year!
Optimize also for MTTR not just MTBF!

34. 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!

35. 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!

36. 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!