Lessons Learned

building a product

RedEyeWFM

  • RedEye's second product
  • Started dev January 2016
  • Product vision is enormous
  • Huge problem we're solving
  • Lot's of markets

Me

  • Graduated 2014 - Computer Science
  • Digital Agency Web Dev
  • RedEye Software Dev
  • RedEye Product Manager

 

Side-projects:

http://piggy.bike

https://dingo.pm

In the beginning (2016)

  • 2 senior backend dev
  • 1 front-end web 👋
  • 1 mobile

Now a team of ~15 (including some non-dev)

On-paper experience might mean jackshit

  • Really quite easy to stay employed 👏
  • Experience should lead to soft skills
  • Problem solving, team work, communication ++++

Choose the right tech

  • Really hard to get right, test and fail first
  • But "I saw it posted at #1 on HN last night" is never a good justification
  • "Yeah but MySQL is not webscale"
  • "PHP can't handle serious internet traffic"

Microservices are hard

  • API Gateway in front of a bunch of servers
  • Shared authentication
  • Fragmented data
  • Networking
  • Deployment?
  • Versioning & Testing
  • Monitoring & Logging
  • Replicating prod issues on dev

 

All of this and we're not really even talking about features...

But, decoupled Architecture Pays Off

  • Built an MVP:
  • Java Backend + SPA + iOS App
  • Threw away Backend
  • Minimal change to SPA + App

And quality-of-life development is awesome

  • Continuous Delivery (auto deploy)
  • Speeding up build times
  • Making developer experience nicer

These things make you more productive, helps with small team, big product

Some tech stack choices come with pre-requisites

Pre-reqs such as:

  • Experience
  • Money
  • Time
  • # of Staff

...most startups don' t have much of these

tl;dr: Keep it simple!

Make the product more valuable without making it more complicated

  • product
  • tech
  • ux

Ways I help the team

  • Insulate them from business bullshit
  • Give them time and breathing space
  • Meetings suck

We're doing (w)internship ❄️

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