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My talk at Etsy's SXSW Microconference, "Moving Fast at Scale." http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/03/01/moving-fast-at-scale-sxsw/ For companion talks (this was one of four), see http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/03/19/moving-fast-at-scale-slides-and-reprise/
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What do we mean by being “at scale”?
The past 15 months were a major growth period for Etsy
> 1 billion page views / month
$300+ million in sales in 2010
$41.1 million in December alone
> $1000 / minute
8.5 million items in the marketplace
400,000+ active sellers
Business in over 150 countries
engineering team grew ~4x in 2010
(about 60 now)
success means growth
servers
people
legacy code and systems
But you want to stay a startup!
What makes a startup a startup?
moving fast
high impact per person
risk-taking
default: “yes, we can”
When startups become “successful”
they slow down
harder for individuals to have high impact
they become risk-averse
more: “maybe we can do that”
We didn’t want to be that way.
You shouldn’t either.
Here’s how we scaled
real, tangible mechanisms in place to stay a startup as we grew.
We’re growing but we still act like a startup!
Really??!!
(Don’t talk. Do!)
Commit to frequent deploys, and the tooling to support it.
(Kellan, Erik, and Mike will talk about this)
Deploys shouldn’t be like this:
OMG! HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS! WE’RE
DEPLOYING!!!!
. . . but more like this:
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/continuous-deployment.html
(we deployed 721 times in November)
Question process at every turn.
Clay Shirky
“Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity.”
Once you add a process, it never goes away.
Bad process is about fear.
For startups:“fear is the biggest no-no”
- Brad Feld
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/fear-is-a-nono.html
Practice: do blameless post-mortems.Do blameless post-mortems.
Practice: do blameless post-mortems.Freaking out doesn’t
create helpful processes.
Peter Drucker
Drucker’s Five Deadly Business Sins (1993)
#5: “feeding problems and starving opportunities”
“All one can get by ‘problem-solving’ is damage-containment. Only opportunities
produce results and growth.”
Practice: do blameless post-mortems.Fight processes that feed problems
and starve opportunities.
Adjust your thinking about risk.
Peter Druckeragain. . . .
“People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”
“People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”
You make more mistakes when you’re tentative.
we had 6 change-related incidents on Etsy in all of 2010
Again, 721 deploys in one month.
And we deployed a major feature on December 1
(4th biggest traffic day in our history)
Hire for immediate impact.
New engineers deploy on first day.
. . . . before they’ve filled out their health insurance paperwork
0
17.5
35
52.5
70
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov
7 810
15
2226
32
5054
57
62
15
2023
2630
35
42
4749
5558
developers / unique deployersDevs Deployers
PMs and Support started deploying here
Those who deploy early. . . .
. . . . also deploy often.
deploys
0
200
400
600
800
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov
6133 50
126 125
184 177
359
682
589
721
Kellan will go into the how and the why!
Photo credits• http://www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/4787141853/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/yomanimus/102798907/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/sercasey/514212348/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorlino/2135206018/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/jayscratch/4993673517/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/cozymemories/4313895482/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/allspaw/5436215259/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/divine_harvester/2119060429/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/mark_wilson/279145377/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/neilsphotoalbum/727616574/
• Other photos licensed from iStockphoto
