Python Adventures in Startup Land

Rachel Willmer

rachel@luzme.com

Slides: http://slideshare.net/rwillmer

Website: http://luzme.com

What is Startup Land?

• You aim for “Minimum Viable Product”

• You don’t have a long-term development

plan

• You write code you know you’ll throw away

• You know that you don’t know what you’re

doing

“Practice Trumps Theory”

Ash Maurya, Author of “Running Lean”

http://practicetrumpstheory.com/

What is a Startup, anyway?

“A Project in search of a

Business Plan that

works”

Which Means Continuous Change

• Design Changes

• Test Changes

• Deployment Changes

• EVERYTHING changes

The Agile Manifesto, 2001

• http://agilemanifesto.org/

• KEY POINTS:

– Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and

continuous delivery of valuable software

– Welcome changing requirements, even late in development...

– Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a

couple of months ...

– Simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done, is

essential

– And others….

What This Means in Practice

• Have a long-term Big Idea

• Plan only short-term work plans, a “sprint”

• Continuously engage with customers

• Be very willing to change everything as you

learn

• Change != Failure

• Change at an early stage = cheap

It’s a marathon, not a sprint

© http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/4782201357

The Lean Startup, 2011

• Term coined by Eric Ries, based on earlier work done

by Steve Blank

• KEY POINTS:

– Product/Market Fit

– Minimum viable product

– Continuous deployment

– Split testing

– Actionable metrics

– Pivot

Lean Links

• http://theleanstartup.com/

• http://runninglean.co/

• http://leananalyticsbook.com/

Fail Early, Fail Often, (Fail Cheap)

• “Fail” = “Try,Learn,Change” not “Failure”

• Mark Suster’s motto:

– “Good judgement comes from experience,

– But experience comes from bad judgement”

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/

How to Fail Early

• Don’t Wait until it’s ready until you talk to your

customers

• Customer Discovery interviews

• Minimum Viable Products

• Verifiable Hypotheses

• Landing Pages

• Ask for money early!

And Now… The Python Bit…

Original Version (2008/9)

What’s Changed?

• I HATE MICROSOFT POWERPOINT!!

• Lovely diagrams should now follow…

• But Microsoft knows best, so I can’t

include them…

So I’ll just keep talking…• Original: webserver + database + cron job

• #1: Extra worker nodes: scraping, API lookups

• #2: Datafeed node

• #3: Overseas workers (geographical location matters!)

• #4: Queueing (celery/rabbitmq)

• #5: Caching (redis)

• #6: Search (solr/elasticsearch)

• #7: Host Monitoring (zenoss)

• #8: Business metrics (logstash, graphite, statsd)

Why Python?

• Really fast to build stuff

• Great support for external services:

elasticsearch, solr, redis, etc.

QUESTIONS?

• Slides are available on slideshare

• http://www.slideshare.net/rwillmer