25. Example
• Moving through tasks a lot faster with 5
people
• Needed more frequent prioritization of
tasks
• Changed biweekly meeting to weekly
meeting
• Added “chat room standups” to facilitate
mid-week adjustments
37. Example
• Needed to write a small server to collect
records into a Distributed Filesystem
• Wrote it using Clojure programming
language
• Huge win: now we use Clojure for most of
our systems
38. Example
• Needed to implement social search
• Wrote it using Neo4j
• Ran into lot of problems with Neo4j and
rewrote it later using Sphinx
39. Example
• Needed an automated deploy for a
distributed stream processing system
• Wrote it using Pallet
• Massive win: anticipate dramatic reduction
in complexity in administering
infrastructure
45. BackSweep
• Issues are recorded on a wiki page
• We spend one day a month removing items
from that wiki page
46. BackSweep
• Keeps our codebase lean
• Gives us a way to defer technical debt
issues when don’t have time to deal with
them
• “Garbage collection for the codebase”
47. What is a startup?
A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new
product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
- Eric Ries
60. Testing hypothesis #2
• Build topic mentions over time graph for
“big topics” our private beta customers are
interested in (e.g. “nike”, “microsoft”,
“apple”, “kodak”)
• Talk to customers
61. Hypothesis #3
• Customers want to see who’s talking about
a topic on a variety of dimensions: recency,
influence, num followers, or num retweets
62. Testing hypothesis #3
• Create search index on last 24 hours of
data that can sort on all dimensions