My talk from Monki Gras 2013.

1. Lanyrd.com
Cheap tricks for Startups
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 PostgreSQL
on EC2 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