This how we are organized at Cozy Cloud, a very young startup with no office and open source products: light agile method, teleworking, open source and fun ! https://cozycloud.cc/ Talk performed @ LyonJS Meetup, April 2013

1. A startup with no office, hipster
tools and open source products

2. Part I
contex t

3. a very young startup
First significant lines of code june 2012
Officially created in september 2012
7 members
Average age: 26 years old

4. limited resources
Funding: around 100k euros
Unemployment benefit for co-founders
No office

5. Constraints/facts
Members in diffferent locations (Grenoble,
Lyon, Paris, Reims)
Respect of the user must be part of the product
Technical team (4 ½ dev, 1 sys admin)

6. Part II
Organization

7. light agile
Daily meeting at 14h (skype)
Short sprints: 1 week (trello)
Short pair programming (mikogo)
Demo every 2 weeks (mikogo)

8. direct communication
IM (skype)
IRC #cozycloud
Phone (emergency)
Good old emails

9. collaboration
Internal wiki (doku wiki)
Public wikis (github)
Ticket system private and public (github)
Forum (vanilla)

10. team building
Sport weekends
Physical meetings every 2 weeks
Short formations with experts

11. open source
Public repositories
Github
Documented applications
Project website separated from company
website (coming soon...)

12. commits (git and github)
Depending of the criticity of the modified code:
- Commit via a pull request
- Commit via a branch
- Commit directly to master
People can commit since day 1

13. admin system
Homemade tools (Python)
Deployment (Fabtools)
Monitoring (Monit)
Backup (DB Replication, Archives)
Virtualization (OpenVz)

14. communication
Micro-blogging (Twitter)
Blog posts (Jekyll)
Newsletters (Mailchimp)
Veille (Wiki)
Alerts (Mention)

15. Part III
pros
and
cons

16. telework
No transport time
Self organization (good for late nighters ;) )
Less interruptions
Fits well with code writing
Tend to share more

17. but...
less friendly, less «human»
It's harder to know when someone needs help

18. open source
External contributions
Transparency for customers and users
Easier to hire
Incentive to document and code well

19. Studies say that creative people works
better when they feel self directed and
when they improve their skills or
master something.

20. open source fits well with these idea:
Collaboration with people from the same field
Recorded track of the stuff done
Something will persist even if the startup closes
Involved in technical choices

21. but...
It requires more communication work
A little bit harder to package
Everyone can see your mistakes

22. Part IV
tips / results

23. tips (1 of 2)
Use trello-like to agree on a week todo-list
When someone does good, say it!
When it's bad, be direct and explain
Try to achieve at least one goal a week by person

24. tips (2 of 2)
Ask others what they think of your solutions
Experiment
Have fun
Always make it exciting

25. some results (1 of 2)
Last month: 150 commits / developer
New members ready in two days
Highly motivated people

26. some results (2 of 2)
Lots of documentation
Getting feedback on all the product aspect
Users like us

27. Appendix A
How Node.js helps us

28. open-source oriented community
Lots of tools to solve common problems
Very active maintainers (fast corrections)
Node is trendy: easier to hire

29. npm
Very easy to deploy app dependencies
Clean manifest
Start coding with 2 commands :
- git clone *myproject.git
- npm install
Some of our tools are in the npm registry

30. one language for the
full stack

31. appendix B
Thx LyonJS
Free Beers and
Pizzas !! !

32. If you like the way we do things why
don't you join us?
contact@cozycloud.cc
#cozycloud on freenode.net
https://forum.cozycloud.cc

33. a talk by...
contact@cozycloud.cc
https://blog.cozycloud.cc
https://twitter.com/mycozycloud
Crédits photos Flickr: benoit simple escargot, orcmid, Castaway,
ccarlstead, ReservasdeCoches
License Creative Commons by-3.0