Drew Engelson discusses strategies for accelerating business through rapid prototyping, emphasizing the importance of fostering a culture of innovation over risk aversion. He compares various frameworks for building web services, specifically highlighting Flask and Django, and stresses the need to embrace failure and encourage experimentation. Engelson advocates for shared knowledge through hack days and mind melds to maintain developer engagement and productivity.

1. Faster! Faster!
Accelerating your business with blazing prototypes
Drew Engelson
@handofdoom

2. Why am I here?

3. I’m Drew Engelson
 I work for Celerity
- “The business acceleration consultancy”
- We help get companies “unstuck”
 I help organizations decide what tech to buy or build
- National Geographic Society
- PBS
- American Diabetes Association
 Then we make it happen

4. First… a disclaimer
 I’m a Pythonista
 I’m a Djangonaut
 Blame OSCON 2006

5. Hence, my huge man-crush on JKM
Photo: Jason Samsa @ Flickr

6. Cultures of stagnation

7. Risk aversion

8. Always choosing path well traveled

9. "Innovation is R&D’s job”
a.k.a. Not your job

10. Dwelling on past investments

11. Over-management and review of new ideas

12. “We have too much real work to do.”

13. Cultures of Innovation
Props to Josh Linkner

14. Fuel passion

15. Celebrate ideas

16. Foster autonomy

17. Encourage courage

18. Fail forward

19. Think small

20. Institutionalize this stuff

21. COTS vs. Open Source

22. “COTS is the safer choice”
No one ever got fired for choosing ___________.

23. “COTS does it out of the box”
That’s horse crap!

24. Photo: Daleeast @ Flickr

25. Photo: Kethera @ Flickr

26. Rapid Prototypes

27. “If only I could show you!”

28. Developers [sometimes] have good ideas
Give ‘em a chance!

29. Reduce the potential cost of failure;
Timebox the experiment
“OK, you get 2 days”

30. The Framework Showdown

31. The challenge
 Build a simple, fully functional prototype
- A basic web service for image transformation
 Requirements
- Pass in a source image url, desired height and width
- Pull down the image to server
- Resize the image on the server
- Return derivative image

32. The challenge
ur l =
ht t p: / / f ar m s t at i c f l i c kr . c om 7138/ 7576110858_d66eec 09f 5_z . j pg
8. /
w dt h = 200
i
hei ght = 200
Photo: Tomcrenshaw @ Flickr

33. I’m talking REAL functional code;
minimize throw away work
Evolve to production

34. Surveyed a few frameworks
 PHP
- Zend
- CodeIgniter
 Python
- Django
- Flask
- Bottle
 I know, there are many other choices… Which is your favorite?

35. Compared on
 Learning curve
 Ease of bootstrapping dev environment
 Ease of development
- # of files created or touched
- # of lines written or modified
- Complexity of code
 Speed of deployment
- Need to share with others, right?
 Note: This is a very non-scientific study

36. The non-scientific results

37. $ pip install Flask requests PIL
Then write ~19 lines of Python

38. i mp o r t c S t r i n g I O
i mp o r t r e q u e s t s
f r o m PI L i mp o r t I mag e
f r o m f l as k i mp o r t F l as k , r e q u e s t , s e n d _ f i l e
ap p = F l as k ( _ _ n ame _ _ )
@ap p . r o u t e ( ' / ' , me t h o d s = [ ' GET' , ] )
d ef res i z e( ) :
u r l = r e q u e s t . val u e s [ ' u r l ' ]
r e q = r e q u e s t s . ge t ( u r l )
r e s o u r c e = c S t r i n g I O. S t r i n g I O( r e q . c o n t e n t )
i mag e = I mag e . o p e n ( r e s o u r c e )
i mag e = i mag e . r e s i z e ( ( i n t ( r e q u e s t . val u e s [ ' w' ] ) ,
i n t ( r e q u e s t . val u e s [ ' h ' ] ) ) ,
I mag e . ANTI AL I AS )
r e s o u r c e = c S t r i n g I O. S t r i n g I O( )
i mag e . s ave ( r e s o u r c e , ' JPEG' )
r e s o u r c e . s e e k ( 0)
r e t u r n s e n d _ f i l e ( r e s o u r c e , mi me t yp e = ' i mag e / j p e g ' )
i f _ _ n ame _ _ = = ' _ _ mai n _ _ ' :
ap p . r u n ( d e b u g = Tr u e )

39. Quick and easy local server
Django: manage.py runserver
Flask: app.run()

40. Get boilerplate out of the way!

41. Don’t trust anything that has built-in smilies 
Sorry, CodeIgniter

42. How do I share it?

43. $ git push heroku master
Really... does anything else matter?

44. What does this all mean?

45. Use what you know!
Learning curve is biggest time suck.

46. Keep it real
Don’t assume failure… this may have legs.

47. Don’t be afraid of…
Failure; the unknown; the undead

48. Give ‘em a little rope…
But don’t hang ‘em with it

49. Hold a few “hack days”

50. Spread knowledge;
Hold sessions to share ideas
I call these “mind melds”

51. Increased pace of innovation leads to…

52. Happier developers leads to…

53. Greater productivity leads to…

54. GOTO 50

55. Resources
 http://flask.pocoo.org/
 https://www.djangoproject.com/
 http://codeigniter.com/
 http://bottlepy.org/
 http://framework.zend.com/
 Josh Linkner
- http://www.inc.com/articles/201106/josh-linkner-7-steps-to-a-culture-of-innovation.html
 I know, there are many other choices… What’s your favorite?

56. Thanks for coming!
Drew Engelson - @handofdoom
dengelson@celerity.com
http://www.celerity.com/