1. Daniel Doubrovkine (dB.)
tweet me: @dblockdotorg
0-60 IN STARTUP TECH
HackYale – Friday, November 2nd

2. First …
 Slides will be online.
 Credit for all good ideas goes to my team’s.
 All bad ideas are my own.

3. Take an awesome idea …

4. … and make working software

5. Day 0
 What will you do?
“Dear ___,
Saw your presentation at ___. I liked the Q&A and learned a bunch of new things.
I have a favor to ask. I’ve joined a NY startup, ___. We’re just starting, and I am
hoping to do things ‘right’ from the start. I was wondering whether I could borrow
someone’s time at ___ next week (yours or someone who works for you) and maybe
bring 1-2 people with me to see how your code and tooling is organized.
Sincerely,
-Me”

6. Day 1
 Pick a Code Name
this is “Gravity”

7. Day 2
 Documents Go Here
Hosted
Free or Cheap
Private
Shareable
Backed Up
 Passwords

8. Day 3
 Tasks Go Here
Create Tasks
Take Tasks
Start Tasks
Complete Tasks

9. Day 4
 A Bit of Process
Extreme
Programming Scrum Waterfall
(XP)
Agile Not Agile
What do we do during the What are all the things we
What do we do next?
next month? need to do this year?
Grow this way  #FAIL

10. Day 5
 Learning
Domain Driven Design
Taxonomy
Specifications
Wireframes
People

11. Week 1
 Scheduled exciting meetings with other startups
 Created a place to store information, a team wiki
 Created a KB and a way to create new knowledge
 Created a place to manage and track work.

12. Week-End
 Sustainable Pace

13. Day 1
 A Plan
Story: Users Can Sign Up

14. Day 1
 Source Control
Repository
Commit
Push
Pull
Merge

15. Day 1
 Code Reviews
Peer review of every check-in
Shared knowledge
Shared responsibility
It’s common to push back
Reviewboard
Crucible

16. Day 1
 Your First Commit
README
GettingStarted.md

17. Day 2
 A Friendly Visit
2-3 People
Bring Pastries
Tell Your Story
Be Impressed
Ask “Why?” 3x
Owe One

18. Day 3: Choosing Technology

19. Stacks

20. A Web Stack
 Backbone.js  Django
 Rails  Python
 Ruby  Apache
 MongoDB  MySQL
 Heroku  Linux
 AWS  Rackspace

21. Stacks
 Help You Focus on The Domain
 Classify Problems
 Offer Generic Solutions
 Provide Consistent Experience
 Map Software Evolution
 Enable Reuse of Skills

22. Big Company: Bakeoff
 Identify Candidates
ASP.NET / RoR / J2EE / LAMP
 Develop Metrics
scalability, complexity, cost
 Gather Data
feature matrix, metrics data
 Compare
=SUM(A:Z)
 Pick a Winner
=MAX(SUM(A:Z))

23. Alternatives: Personal Favorite

24. Alternatives: Trustworthy People
 It worked before
 It didn’t work before
 It’s new and shiny
 Someone I trust uses it

25. Alternatives: Simplicity
 The Emperor’s Old Clothes
Charles Hoare, 1981
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358561&bnc=1

26. Alternatives: Developer Happiness
 Developers Are Happy with
Their Own Choices
Cutting Edge Technology

27. Does it really matter?
 Try It … Iterate … Keep It … Toss It
Easy to Learn
Frustration-less
Quick to Leverage
Vibrant Community Time
Elegant Solutions
Results
Fighting
Learning

28. Day 4
 Implement a Story w/ Tests
 Setup Continuous Integration
Writing tests makes development faster, not
slower from day one four.

29. Day 4
 Continuous Deployment
Development
Staging
Production
Demo

30. Day 5
 Demo Day!
Developers know how to get started.
Developers can commit code with a peer code review.
Every time a developer checks in code, continuous integration runs tests and
e-mails results to the team.
Every time continuous integration executed tests successfully, staging gets
the latest code.
We can deploy to production by hitting a button!

31. A Sprint: Week 3 & 4
 User-Facing Stories
 Under-Promise and Over-Deliver
 Make People Happy
 Keep Things Simple
 Don’t Acquire Technical Debt

32. People
 People make all the difference
 Cultural fit is more important than technical abilities
 There’re excellent developers that are a bad cultural fit
 There’re bad developers that are an excellent cultural fit
 Generalists are Often Better than Specialists
 Pigs, not Chickens

33. Your Resume
 Passion to Professionalism
 Examples of Doing
 Consistent Delivery
 Demonstrable Experience
 Strong References

34. You
 Doer
 Humble
 Listens
 Self-Sufficient
 Thorough

35. Questions
name: Daniel Doubrovkine (aka. dB.)
company: http://art.sy
twitter: @dblockdotorg
blog: http://code.dblock.org
email: dblock@dblock.org
slides: http://slideshare.net/dblockdotorg