Cheap tricks for startups

My talk from Monki Gras 2013 -

1. Cheap tricks for Startups Lanyrd.com Simon Willison @simonw Monki Gras, 31st January 2013 http://lanyrd.com/sccqcy
2. Early-stage startup engineering is different
3. What are the quickest tools to build that provide the most value?
4. Cheap experimentation
5. FEATURE_FLAGS = { 'new_maps': 'Uses MapBox rather than Google', 'login_picker': '/signin/ page with picker', 'login_linkedin': 'Sign in with LinkedIn', # ... }
6. @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'): # ...
7. <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>
8. Feature flags apply to individual users and/or user tags, e.g. alpha, beta, lanyrd-team
9. “preview” tag controls flags available on private preview.lanyrd.com (for testing logged-out features)
10. Feature flags help keep trunk deployable
11. Cheap deployment
12. $ fab e:live deploy $ fab e:staging target:feature/linkedin deploy
15. Deployment should be... Easy Fast Cheap
16. Everyone deploys on their first day!
17. Read only mode
18. MySQL on EC2 PostgreSQL on SoftLayer with no downtime http://lanyrd.com/blog/2012/lanyrds-big-move/
19. Cheap analytics
20. The History table
21. Internal metrics • created_at field on EVERY table, no exceptions • Makes building graphs of site growth trivial • updated_at useful but not essential
22. 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
24. Cheap tricks Feature flags Read only mode History table Daily calculated reports http://lanyrd.com/sccqcy