Faster! Faster! Accelerating your business
with blazing prototypes Drew Engelson @handofdoom

Why am I here?

I’m Drew Engelson  I
work for Celerity - “The business acceleration consultancy” - We help get companies “unstuck”  I help organizations decide what tech to buy or build - National Geographic Society - PBS - American Diabetes Association  Then we make it happen

First… a disclaimer  I’m
a Pythonista  I’m a Djangonaut  Blame OSCON 2006

Hence, my huge man-crush on
JKM Photo: Jason Samsa @ Flickr

Cultures of stagnation

Risk aversion

Always choosing path well traveled

"Innovation is R&D’s job” a.k.a.
Not your job

Dwelling on past investments

Over-management and review of new
ideas

“We have too much real
work to do.”

Cultures of Innovation Props to
Josh Linkner

Fuel passion

Celebrate ideas

Foster autonomy

Encourage courage

Fail forward

Think small

Institutionalize this stuff

COTS vs. Open Source

“COTS is the safer choice”
No one ever got fired for choosing ___________.

“COTS does it out of
the box” That’s horse crap!

Photo: Daleeast @ Flickr

Photo: Kethera @ Flickr

Rapid Prototypes

“If only I could show
you!”

Developers [sometimes] have good ideas
Give ‘em a chance!

Reduce the potential cost of
failure; Timebox the experiment “OK, you get 2 days”

The Framework Showdown

The challenge  Build a
simple, fully functional prototype - A basic web service for image transformation  Requirements - Pass in a source image url, desired height and width - Pull down the image to server - Resize the image on the server - Return derivative image

The challenge ur l =
ht t p: / / f ar m s t at i c f l i c kr . c om 7138/ 7576110858_d66eec 09f 5_z . j pg 8. / w dt h = 200 i hei ght = 200 Photo: Tomcrenshaw @ Flickr

I’m talking REAL functional code;
minimize throw away work Evolve to production

Surveyed a few frameworks 
PHP - Zend - CodeIgniter  Python - Django - Flask - Bottle  I know, there are many other choices… Which is your favorite?

Compared on  Learning curve
 Ease of bootstrapping dev environment  Ease of development - # of files created or touched - # of lines written or modified - Complexity of code  Speed of deployment - Need to share with others, right?  Note: This is a very non-scientific study

The non-scientific results

$ pip install Flask requests
PIL Then write ~19 lines of Python

i mp o r t
c S t r i n g I O i mp o r t r e q u e s t s f r o m PI L i mp o r t I mag e f r o m f l as k i mp o r t F l as k , r e q u e s t , s e n d _ f i l e ap p = F l as k ( _ _ n ame _ _ ) @ap p . r o u t e ( ' / ' , me t h o d s = [ ' GET' , ] ) d ef res i z e( ) : u r l = r e q u e s t . val u e s [ ' u r l ' ] r e q = r e q u e s t s . ge t ( u r l ) r e s o u r c e = c S t r i n g I O. S t r i n g I O( r e q . c o n t e n t ) i mag e = I mag e . o p e n ( r e s o u r c e ) i mag e = i mag e . r e s i z e ( ( i n t ( r e q u e s t . val u e s [ ' w' ] ) , i n t ( r e q u e s t . val u e s [ ' h ' ] ) ) , I mag e . ANTI AL I AS ) r e s o u r c e = c S t r i n g I O. S t r i n g I O( ) i mag e . s ave ( r e s o u r c e , ' JPEG' ) r e s o u r c e . s e e k ( 0) r e t u r n s e n d _ f i l e ( r e s o u r c e , mi me t yp e = ' i mag e / j p e g ' ) i f _ _ n ame _ _ = = ' _ _ mai n _ _ ' : ap p . r u n ( d e b u g = Tr u e )

Quick and easy local server
Django: manage.py runserver Flask: app.run()

Get boilerplate out of the
way!

Don’t trust anything that has
built-in smilies  Sorry, CodeIgniter

How do I share it?

$ git push heroku master
Really... does anything else matter?

What does this all mean?

Use what you know! Learning
curve is biggest time suck.

Keep it real Don’t assume
failure… this may have legs.

Don’t be afraid of… Failure;
the unknown; the undead

Give ‘em a little rope…
But don’t hang ‘em with it

Hold a few “hack days”

Spread knowledge; Hold sessions to
share ideas I call these “mind melds”

Increased pace of innovation leads
to…

Happier developers leads to…

Greater productivity leads to…

GOTO 50

Resources  http://flask.pocoo.org/  https://www.djangoproject.com/
 http://codeigniter.com/  http://bottlepy.org/  http://framework.zend.com/  Josh Linkner - http://www.inc.com/articles/201106/josh-linkner-7-steps-to-a-culture-of-innovation.html  I know, there are many other choices… What’s your favorite?

Thanks for coming! Drew Engelson
- @handofdoom dengelson@celerity.com http://www.celerity.com/