Cheap tricks for startups

Lanyrd.comCheap tricks for Startups Simon Willison @simonw Monki Gras, 31st January 2013 http://lanyrd.com/sccqcy

Early-stagestartup engineering is different

What are the quickest tools tobuild 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 topic</a></p> </div> {% flagactive topic_tracking %} BETA ONLY {% endflagactive %} {% endflag %} </div>

Feature flags apply to individual users and/or user tags, e.g.alpha, beta, lanyrd-team

“preview” tag controlsflags available on private preview.lanyrd.com (for testing logged-out features)

Feature flags helpkeep trunk deployable

Cheap deployment

$ fab e:live deploy$ fab e:staging target:feature/linkedin deploy

Deployment should be... Easy Fast Cheap

Everyone deployson their first day!

Read only mode

MySQL PostgreSQLon EC2 on SoftLayer with no downtimehttp://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

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Cheap tricks for startups

by Simon Willison on Jan 31, 2013

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