1. Allan Chao
Startup Consultant
Startup V8
allan@startupv8.com
UC Berkeley Extension, Summer 2012

2. Question of the day:
How many people are involved
in building a web application?

3. The Agenda
 Quiz
 Quick review of last session
 Servers, Hosting
 Deployment
 Release Cycles, Project Management
 Engineering management

4. Quiz Time
Good luck!
10 minutes max

5. Quick review of prior material
 Databases
 IDE Comparison
 Database model
 Notepad++
 Entity relationship model
 NetBeans
 SQL
 Visual Studio
 Database Engines
 Backend Programming
 RDBMS
 Truly requires clarification of ideas
 MYSQL
 Complexity
 SQL Server
 Programming Languages
 APIs
 Programming example (calculator)
 Application Programing Interface
 Backend integration with frontend
 Precautions
 ASP.NET
 SDK = Software Development Kit
 Error validation
 Technology Stacks
 Principles of Programming
 Many different options in different layers
 Some code is better than others
 LAMP = Linux Apache Mysql PHP
 Mistakes have a high cost
 WINS = Windows IIS .NET SQL Server

7. What is Hosting?
 Where you store the code
 Makes the website publicly-accessible
 What you’re paying for:
 Physical components
 Disk space (space in GB)
 Memory (RAM)
 Processing power (CPU)
 Datacenter costs
 Electricity
 Cooling
 Network Bandwidth
 Administration (technical skill)

8. What is a server?
 Physical machine
 Usually horizontal, 1-2 inches tall
 Designed and built for reliability, not features
 Lots of redundant components

9. What is a data center?
 A.k.a. Server farm
 Lots of computers
 Room gets hot…
 Lots of fans, very
loud
 High security

10. 3 most common hosting options
 3 most common hosting options
 Dedicated Hosting
 Shared Hosting
 Virtual Private Server (VPS)
 Other hosting options
 Colocation
 Cloud hosting

11. Dedicated Hosting
 Means you rent a physical machine provided by the
host
 Hardware options provided by the host, you pick one
 Tends to be around $200-1000/month per machine,
depending on quality
 Great option for almost-total control
 When is it right?
 If you need lots of power and control.
However, costs can be high.

12. Shared Hosting
 You “share” a dedicated host with other customers (you
don’t know who they are)
 Share CPU-power
 Share network connection
 Sometimes, share IP address
 You have limited access to the computer, so less flexibility
 When is it right?
 Generally a poor choice for startups
 Better choice for small business websites

13. Virtual Private Server (VPS)
 Virtual Private Server = “virtual machine”
 Like having a dedicated server, except that there isn’t a
physical machine you own.
 Your machine is a “virtual” machine, that lives inside
of a physical machine.
• When is it right?
• Low cost way of having lots
of control.
• Great option to start

15. Colocation
 Means you buy your own physical machine
 Much more expensive than consumer machines… generally costs
at least $4,000, easily $10,000
 In addition to monthly fees to data center
 You choose the hardware
 Maximum flexibility regarding the hardware used (e.g. fancy servers and
storage configurations)
 You manage everything.
 Requires more effort and management compared to cloud and managed
 When is it right?
 Best for maturing startups that can afford costly servers and hire
staff to manage them

16. Cloud Hosting
 “Pay as you go”, pay-for-use
 Amazon EC2, S3
 Good for starting out when server needs are unknown and
it’s easy to scale up and down quickly
 Best for environments that have differing scale needs on a
regular basis
 (e.g. imagine you normally need 20 servers but for a few
hours each night you need 100 servers to crunch data)
 When is it right?
 Great low-cost way to start, but limitations can be
frustrating
 Excellent choice if sudden scale is needed

17. Comparison
Managed (dedicated, Colocation Cloud
shared, VPS) (aka colo)
Cost at first Average Very high Very low
Cost at scale Average-high Low Very high
Flexibility Medium Very flexible Not flexible
Management Depends on host You manage Harder to manage

18. Tools for hosting
 Who is hosting a website?
 http://www.whoishostingthis.com
 Note that high-traffic websites run their own data
centers

19. Rackspace
 http://www.rackspacestartups.com/

20. Try Buying Hosting
 Cheaper and lower-quality options
 Your domain registrant
 Bluehost, dreamhost, etc.
 Better and more expensive options
 Rackspace
 Softlayer

22. Deployment
 Deployment = Release = Shipping
 The process of getting a website from your local
machine to the host
 Once it is on the host, it’s viewable by the public

23. FTP
 File Transfer Protocol
 Very old way of transferring files
 We’ll use Filezilla

24. Practice Deploying
 FTP Connect to 208.79.77.29
 Username class
 Password: same password as classroom computers
 Create a folder with your name (lowercase, one word)
 Upload your HTML files
 Test it at http://class.testing.startupv8.com/yourname

25. Multiple Environments
 Risks of single-environment
 Accidental deployment
 Very hard to recover in production
 High cost, high pressure, lots of “site is down” time
 Dev > QA > Staging > Production
 The “build” process
 Automated tests
 Automatic documentation and/or release notes
 Automatically moving from one stage to another
 “latest build”, “nightly build”, “build 142”

26. Advanced Deployment Tools
 Beyond Compare (like FTP, but highlights line-by-line
differences)
 Custom programs
 Write your own script that copies files
 Available software
 xCopy / robocopy
 MSDeploy
 UrbanCode www.urbancode.com

28. Release Planning and Cycles
 Planning process of what
to deploy and when
 MVP
 Version 2
 Version 3…

29. Case study: firefox

30. Project Management
 Starts off as…
 1 product owner, 1 designer, 1 engineer = 3 people
 Soon afterward…
 1 product owner, 1 designer, 3 engineers = 5 people
 Company grows…
 1 product owner, 2 designers, 4 engineers,
1 project manager, 1 tester = 9 people
 Project management = coordination and allocation of
people, time, money.

31. Gantt chart
 Like a waterfall process
 Great for known projects
 Less applicable for ongoing development

32. Agile Development
 Small, incremental Iterations
 1-2 weeks
 Standing meetings
 “Product owner”
 Burndown charts

33. Tools for Project Management
 FugBugz
 BaseCamp
 Trello
 Pivotal Tracker

34. Budgeting
 Very hard to budget new development projects
 How much does it cost to build a house? It depends
 Do a bottom up estimate, not a top down estimate
 A 2-story house in a specific subdivision with a garage
and 3 bed 2 bath with the same interior that all the other
houses in the subdivision have?

35. Ninety-ninety rule

36. Good project management
 Setting milestones
 Hitting the milestones
 Lots of communication
 Don’t change the features
 Go through the design process

37. Tips on Shipping
 Stick to a feature-set, and build it.
 Adding developers doesn’t always make the project finish sooner
 “The mythical man-month”
 Q: How does a large software project get to be one year late?
 A: One day at a time!

38. Deployments
on closed
platforms
 E.g. Apple App Store
 Unclear requirements
 Time consuming and
frustrating

40. Hiring Developers
 Hiring full time developers
 Very hard, very expensive
 Part-time developers (freelancers)
 Tends to be the best option for startups
 Difficult even for engineers to assess skill in an interview
 Developers are almost never effective on joining a
project… always takes training time

41. Managing Developers
 Great developers are very self-motivated
 They like to work on things they think are important
 They like to solve interesting problems
 Constant pressure is annoying

42. Extreme Programming
 A subtype of agile development
 Adds some elements
 Pair programming
 Extensive unit testing
 Flat management

43. Code Reviews
 Engineers look over each other’s code as a “second pair
of eyes”
 Tends to result in much better code
 Also enables peer-to-peer training

44. Outsourcing
 Tends to be very difficult for startups
 Low quality work
 Offshore companies do not design
 And they produce low-quality code
 Poor communication
 The takeaway: tempting, but usually a net loss

46. Homework
 Individual, read the following:
 Read Michael Wolfe’s answer... http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Management/Why-
are-software-development-task-estimations-regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3
 Mythical man-month… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
 (Team) Deploy your application
 If there’s no backend, that’s OK
 (Team) Keep Going!!
 Keep programming
 Keep working on the pitch deck
 Keep marketing your new startup
 Occasionally review the market research data (Google Analytics, etc.)