Doing more with less
Elliot Coad
Head of Development - Shortlist Media
//shortlist.studio
Who we are
-
We were born into the magazine industry in 2007 with ShortList and Stylist
- Market leaders with ~800,000 copies per week
//shortlist.studio
Who we are becoming
- A technology-led media publisher
- Well underway digital transformation
//shortlist.studio
dangerously digital
Digital Transformation
2007
2017
Current digital properties
//shortlist.studio
Current digital properties (cont)
- Maps
- CMS product
- Display ad platform
- Native ad platform
- Comps and vouchers
- Facebook Instant Articles
- Apple News
- New launches, enhancements
- CMS user support
- AWS: ~40 EC2 instances, S3, RDS, etc.
- IT support (!)
- ...
//shortlist.studio
The huge team to support all of this...
//shortlist.studio
(until very recently)
How we do more with less
//shortlist.studio
Complexity Management
- Understading the fan out of requirements
- Too easy to say yes
//shortlist.studio
Unmanaged complexity
Team are stretched too far
//shortlist.studio
Unable to accommodate changes
Business cannot pivot
Tech debt accumulates
Milestones missed
Place emphasis on the business value
Not doing it
//shortlist.studio
Dependencies
Complexity
Communication
Ill-defined
Excitableness
Do the maths
Calculate the long term cost:
- Solve manual tasks
- Choose wisely
- Visual
- Simple
- Not annoying
- Well configured
Leveraging robots
//shortlist.studio
Leveraging robots
//shortlist.studio
Leveraging robots
//shortlist.studio
Backups
Deployment manager
Communication tools
Bug management
Logging tools
Performance monitoring
Server monitoring
Dependency management
Continuous Integration
...
Staff holiday management
What are you doing over and over?
Make them your products
Identify your patterns
//shortlist.studio
Tapestry
Croissant
Kitchin
Telemetry
Enable/Disable everything
Circuit Breaker pattern
//shortlist.studio
Lean codebases
Core product functions
- Full stack developers
- Easy to get started
- Prioritisation clash
- Security
- Scale/Resilience
- Disaster recovery
Hosting/sysops: the past
//shortlist.studio
Dev tasks
Sysops
- Wirehive as a extension of our team
- Named person appointed to us
-
Access to pool of >30 specialists
- Particular CDN
- Hosting Node
- Performance
- DB management
- Obscure Varnish config
Hosting/sysops: now
//shortlist.studio
Sysops
Dev tasks
-
Design flexible hosting models
-
Scripts to spin up hosting environments
-
Security
-
Backups and disaster recovery
-
Load testing
-
Monitoring/alerting
-
Proactive hours
-
24/7/365 service
-
Holiday/illness cover
Hosting/sysops: now
//shortlist.studio
- Small tech-debt pile
-
Reducing potential for burnout
-
Keeping to office hours
-
Make sure no-one is drowning
-
Socials/hackdays
-
Pair programming
-
-
Staff retention
-
Capacity for innovation
-
Keep enjoying what you do
What to do with all this free time?
//shortlist.studio
thanks
//shortlist.studio
Doing more with less
By ecoad
Doing more with less
- 716