The document discusses strategies for building software quickly by standing on the shoulders of giants and leveraging existing open source projects and libraries. It acknowledges common problems like reinventing the wheel and fear of the unknown that prevent reuse. The author advocates looking for existing solutions that match your needs and problems before writing new code, and shares experiences successfully using existing social networking, e-commerce, and push notification libraries to accelerate development. The overall message is that reuse allows you to ship projects faster with fewer bugs by leveraging the work of others.

1. SHOULDERS
OF
GIANTS
JON ROES

2. OVERVIEW
•Problems
•Strategies for building things quickly
•My experiences

4. WE NEED TO TALK
Building software takes too long.
And half the time it’s buggy.
Or it doesn’t even solve the problem.

5. IT’S NOT JUST YOU, IT’S ME TOO
•Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome
•“Unwillingness to value the work of others”
•Fear of the unknown
•Programming is fun

6. OUR SHARED
PROBLEMS
•You are not a unique snowflake.
•You aren’t really interested in software, you
are solving a problem
•Maybe you’re different because you’re
wrong

7. CONFESSION
•I don’t always want to write code.
•Would you want me to spend more or less
time shipping your project?
•Would I want to spend more or less time
shipping my project?
•You don’t want me to write code either.

8. PHILOSOPHY
•Why are humans so successful?
•What if we never wrote the same code
twice?
•How can we push the state of the art
further?

9. HISTORY
•Math: Numbers -> Arithmetic -> Algebra -> Abstract Algebra
•Science: Galileo -> Brahe -> Kepler -> Newton
•The Avengers: Hulk beats Loki, Iron Man stops the missile, Black Widow deactivates
portal

10. NEWTON

11. ART
Good artists copy.
Great artists steal.

12. STRATEGIES

13. CLASSES OF PROBLEMS
•Social networks
•Stores
•Blogs
•Chat/Forums
•Static

14. WHAT TO LOOK FOR
•Necessity
•Level of match
•Exact match
•Kinda-sorta
•Properties
•Age
•Author
•License
•Recent Activity

15. THE UGLY
•Getting cornered
•Picking something unmaintained
•Dependency hell

16. RISK MANAGEMENT
•Start on a branch
•Make the smallest change you can first
•Set a timebox

17. WHEN BUILDING MAKES SENSE
•You need a particular feature that would be at odds with the current
philosophy.
•The existing maintainer won’t play nicely
•It really doesn’t exist
•You are the world’s foremost expert in the area

18. MY EXPERIENCES

19. SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE
•Missed opportunity
•Could have shipped faster
•Could have delivered more
•Could have had fewer bugs

20. E-COMMERCE SITE
•Went with Spree
•Could buy a product with a credit card on day one
•Immediately better: searching, filtering, product management,
reporting
•Helped define categories/taxonomy
•Clean, easy to extend codebase

21. PUSH NOTIFICATIONS
•No familiarity with iOS push notifications
•Found a library called Grocer, used it
•Sending push notifications in a day

22. GET OUT THERE
•Contribute to awesome projects
•Make them better
•If not, convince your boss to donate money