The Application of New Features to an Established Application

(02/29/2008)

5:23

Terek is back on stage and we're still talking about XFN. It's his baby.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:23

5:26

"itteration, our next topic"
"We're going to make some really interesting mistakes."

Friday February 29, 2008 5:26

5:26

Cal Henderson walks on.. shorts, sandals.. this should be good.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:26

5:27

Using great pictures for slides.. what a surprise, he's from Flickr.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:27

5:27

His abstract isn't what he'll be talking about...

Friday February 29, 2008 5:27

5:27

Flickr has "much of muchness"

Friday February 29, 2008 5:27

5:27

data, code, users, etc.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:27

5:28

"pick any two nouns, put them togeher.. website"

Friday February 29, 2008 5:28

5:28

ok, he's having us on..

Friday February 29, 2008 5:28

5:29

Now he's talking about how Robots are going to kill us. "3 -5 years"

Friday February 29, 2008 5:29

5:29

Slide : Whatever the process, tools can help.

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5:30

Tools aren't a silver bullet.. but they make things go faster.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:30

5:30

We'll be talking about getting from A to B faster..

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5:30

Slide : Identify what's slow

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5:31

t might not be something that's actually slow.. just something we do a lot, that as aggragate is slow.

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5:31

Slide : But that's a waste of time!

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5:32

if you spend your time working on the right tools.. you'll go faster.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:32

5:32

spending 10% of your time building tools is reasonable. If they make your life easier

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5:33

Tools in three phases.. develop, deploy, maintain

Friday February 29, 2008 5:33

5:34

Source control. "working in a team of more than one person, it's a good idea"

Friday February 29, 2008 5:34

5:34

Most important tool you should use. Source Control.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:34

5:35

(personal observation) -1 obvious but, you can't hear it enough. There can never be enough source control.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:35

5:35

Repository browser.. is the next tool you need

Friday February 29, 2008 5:35

5:36

the command line isn't the way.. Quick visual interface

Friday February 29, 2008 5:36

5:37

He's showing ViewVC.. a web interface to SVN? There are plenty of these.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:37

5:37

Now automation tools.. making the repository notify you of changes, etc.

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5:38

using post-commit hooks. Makes it easy to find who broke it.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:38

5:38

pre-commit hooks allwo you to do things like prevent check-ins on code that doesn't validate.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:38

5:39

Talking about Subversion (svn) and how much awesomeness therein

Friday February 29, 2008 5:39

5:40

Keeping track of things to do is up next.

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5:40

in your head, on post-it notes.

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5:40

Obviously he's working up to something.

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5:40

Whiteboards.

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5:40

Wikis. "It's whereyou put all your crap in a shed"

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5:40

Bugtackers

Friday February 29, 2008 5:40

5:41

Showing Yahoo!'s bugzilla

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5:41

Bugtraking software is too complicated.

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5:42

From expereience, he's totally right.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:42

5:42

They built a simple interface on top of Mantis and saved a ton of time.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:42

5:42

Fewer required fields.. assign stuff to yourself. Makes it more like a todo list

Friday February 29, 2008 5:42

5:43

Graph : Tools, complexity, power.. Complexity grows as power grows.. Cal says this isn't true.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:43

5:43

Good tools are powerful and simple

Friday February 29, 2008 5:43

5:43

Enterprise tools are weak and complex.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:43

5:44

Oh Cal, how true.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:44

5:44

now talkign about Extreme Programming

Friday February 29, 2008 5:44

5:44

test early, test often.. continuous integration

Friday February 29, 2008 5:44

5:45

writing tests is really dull, often harder than writing the code itself..

Friday February 29, 2008 5:45

5:47

Talking abuto the science behind regression testing. IFyou write a test for a bug you find, then validate the test by fixing the bug, leave the test in your suite.. that way you're always testing things that have shown likely to fail before.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:47

5:48

Talking about a build tool called Tinderbox. Automated builder that tests and shows if the current repository is buildable.

Friday February 29, 2008 5:48

5:48

Showing Flickr's version of Tinderbox. it's a suite of tests that pass and fail.. Shows things that passed last time, failed now.. so you can easily spot new probelms

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5:49

Tinderbox + Alerts = FTW!

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5:49

Now on to release management

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5:50

explaining "continuous production"

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5:50

basically the assembly line

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5:51

keeping things moving at a pace, so that parts of the chain don't starve..
in software this is called continuous release

Friday February 29, 2008 5:51

5:51

Graph : Awesome increases with time. Or, it should.

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5:52

the bigger the steps beween releases.. the more likely it'll kill you.
Oh god, if I could only decribe this. Great slide

Friday February 29, 2008 5:52

5:52

The point is, release often so the steps are smaller.

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5:53

Somewhere between imcrementalists (ship anything that works) and completeionsists (don't ship anything that isn't 100%!) is the answer.

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5:54

Slide : Branching vs. Flags

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5:55

Flickr is anti branching and pro feature flags.

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5:55

branches encourage the longer steps between releases. Feature flags keep iterations short

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5:56

Deployment.

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5:57

Tools for deplying should be very simple.

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5:57

ideally, one button deploy

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5:58

kick off one script and deploy the new version.. you're less likely to make mistakes in repetitive actions, and you'll take the burden of deployment away

Friday February 29, 2008 5:58

5:59

continuous production shoudn't have a release manager. Ouch! Hey, that was my job one time!

Friday February 29, 2008 5:59

6:00

it adds complexity.. showing a simple tool htat basically replaces the release manager..

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6:00

I could replace you with a very small shell script.

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6:01

summing up..

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6:01

automate common tasks

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6:02

applying the same kinds of ideas to shrink wrap ware.

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6:02

completionists win in theory in the shrink wrap ware world

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6:03

Firefox uses a more implementaitionist style, and Cal thinks it's awesome

Friday February 29, 2008 6:03

6:06

explaining the Flickr Uploader update process.. like Mozillas but more forceful

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6:07

Showing of the maintenence tools.. Ganglia.sourceforge.ne. montiors most of Flickr

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6:08

Graphs showing the rate of something over time allows you to estimate capacity planning

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6:09

The trend shows the point before which change must occur to avoid the limits

Friday February 29, 2008 6:09

6:10

He's running over time. They let him continue

Friday February 29, 2008 6:10

6:10

He's zipping through slides, this could be a whole other presentation. This guy is terribl interesting. Best presentation all day. This is info you can actually use.

Friday February 29, 2008 6:10

6:11

The Spaghetti monster godhead has been invoked.

Friday February 29, 2008 6:11

6:12

More tools they use internally to manage the system. Twitter could use this talk. :)

Friday February 29, 2008 6:12

6:13

He's done.. roaring applause.

Friday February 29, 2008 6:13

6:14

summary.. Robots, one button. KTHXBYE!