Talk at Scale Camp UK 4 Dec 2009

1. Lessons learned in
doing lots with few people.
Ed Freyfogle - UK Scale Camp - 4 Dec. 2009

2. About us:

3. About us:
4.5 full time devs, 0 ops, 0 IT support
Operate in 5 markets, 4 languages, ~ 2M UU/month
Mountains of data updating continually
Relationships with most major European media groups
Present data in many different ways: html, whitelabels,
rss/gpx/kml, API, widgets, etc, etc.

4. Work Smarter, Not Harder
Do less, better
NOT
Do more, more quickly

5. No Fires
Bad news is fine. No surprises!
Love your automated tests
Clear development/testing/launch process

6. Speaking of Processes…
Have a process
hiring, speed day, ops tasks, mundane/repetitive work
Adapt the process as you need, but be explicit
One bad way is better than two good ways

7. Make your team easy to join
Make documenting easy
- wiki, autogenned doc pages, don’t doc things that don’t need it
Clean interfaces between systems
Interns
- highly effective if good (ie well hired) and well managed

8. Stand on shoulders of giants
Reuse, don’t reinvent
But not always …..
(not invented here versus not understood here)
Make time to give back

9. Get other people to do your work

10. Things not to skimp on
Formal training
Events/Conferences
“fun” projects
Hardware

11. DO LESS, BETTER!!!!

12. Learn more
About me:
@freyfogle
About Nestoria:
http://www.nestoria.com
@nestoria

13. Questions?