1. Python Adventures
in Startup Land
Rachel Willmer
rachel@luzme.com
Slides: http://slideshare.net/rwillmer
Website: http://luzme.com

2. What is Startup Land?
• You aim for “MinimumViable 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

3. “PracticeTrumpsTheory”
Ash Maurya, Author of “Running Lean”
http://practicetrumpstheory.com/

4. What is a Startup, anyway?
“A Project in search of a
Business Plan that works”

5. Which Means Continuous Change
• Design Changes
• Test Changes
• DeploymentChanges
• EVERYTHING changes

6. 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….

7. WhatThis 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

8. It’s a marathon, not a sprint
© http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/4782201357

9. 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

10. Lean Links
• http://theleanstartup.com/
• http://runninglean.co/
• http://leananalyticsbook.com/

11. 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/

12. How to Fail Early
• Don’tWait until it’s ready until you talk to your customers
• Customer Discovery interviews
• MinimumViable Products
• Verifiable Hypotheses
• Landing Pages
• Ask for money early!

13. And Now…The Python Bit…

14. OriginalVersion (2008/9)

15. What’s Changed?
• I HATE MICROSOFT POWERPOINT!!
• Lovely diagrams should now follow…
• But Microsoft knows best, so I can’t include
them…

16. 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)

17. Why Python?
• Really fast to build stuff
• Great support for external services:
elasticsearch, solr, redis, etc.

18. QUESTIONS?
• Slides are available on slideshare
• http://www.slideshare.net/rwillmer