I am often asked how I do things and why. In most cases it really does come down to thinking about three things and making sure they are properly tended to at all times. Those three things are people, process and technology in that order.
With the right people you can do anything you can set your mind to doing within the realms of possibility. With the right process you will be far more effective than the next team and your operations will be able to scale. With the right technology you will be enough out on the edge to get ahead but rock solid and scalable so that you will not crumble under brittleness or technical debt (also related to process mind you).
I haven’t been blogging much lately because I’m really quite wrapped up in my work for my clients as well as just trying to spend more time with my family. I am trying to find ways to get back into the blogging grove more than once a month though. I’ve been building Social CRM and Business Analytics solutions for some clients on two interesting technology stacks. One stack is a Riak, Redis, RabbitMQ, Jetty, Scala/Java, Akka, Nginx core stack on AWS. The other is MongoDB, RabbitMQ, PHP/Symfony2, Node.js, Nginx core stack on AWS. There are other techs involved of course. They both use Chef extensively for example. One uses CI with Jenkins as part of the process, both use automated deployment tools in Ruby (capistrano primarily). Both of these are slated for public release in short order so I’ll be able to say more then. It’s been truly interesting working on them in parallel and I’m very excited to see them go live over the next weeks.
In both cases, it’s the team, the process, and the technology that have made it possible to process large amounts of data, deploy tremendous amounts of code fast, and create products that have excellent potential to make a difference to their users and scale well over time.
So, if you ask me to build you something you’ll be hearing me ask if you are willing to make the commitment to the people, processes, and technologies that will make it a reality fast. When it all comes together it is great fun!
I hope to get some time to write more about the actual details of this trinity in the near future. Be patient, I have to pay the bills you know!
With the right people you can do anything you can set your mind to doing within the realms of possibility. With the right process you will be far more effective than the next team and your operations will be able to scale. With the right technology you will be enough out on the edge to get ahead but rock solid and scalable so that you will not crumble under brittleness or technical debt (also related to process mind you).
I haven’t been blogging much lately because I’m really quite wrapped up in my work for my clients as well as just trying to spend more time with my family. I am trying to find ways to get back into the blogging grove more than once a month though. I’ve been building Social CRM and Business Analytics solutions for some clients on two interesting technology stacks. One stack is a Riak, Redis, RabbitMQ, Jetty, Scala/Java, Akka, Nginx core stack on AWS. The other is MongoDB, RabbitMQ, PHP/Symfony2, Node.js, Nginx core stack on AWS. There are other techs involved of course. They both use Chef extensively for example. One uses CI with Jenkins as part of the process, both use automated deployment tools in Ruby (capistrano primarily). Both of these are slated for public release in short order so I’ll be able to say more then. It’s been truly interesting working on them in parallel and I’m very excited to see them go live over the next weeks.
In both cases, it’s the team, the process, and the technology that have made it possible to process large amounts of data, deploy tremendous amounts of code fast, and create products that have excellent potential to make a difference to their users and scale well over time.
So, if you ask me to build you something you’ll be hearing me ask if you are willing to make the commitment to the people, processes, and technologies that will make it a reality fast. When it all comes together it is great fun!
I hope to get some time to write more about the actual details of this trinity in the near future. Be patient, I have to pay the bills you know!