Scaling ideas and principles.

Chris&an HeilmannLaunch 48, London, England, June 2010

It is very easy to build things and put them on the web.

Making them work for a lot of people is much harder.

You can however do things to prepare yourself for the future.

The first thing to remember is to delegate to experts.

Not a good driver.

If you want to scale as a business, don’t try to be Pinky.

Instead, partner with experts do to expert work for you.

Pick a big goal

And then chunk it up into parts you should deal with.

And others that are already services you can use instead of re-inventing them.

Hosting of your product should not be in one spot.

Separate your product interface and the data you provide or store.

And pick specialised services and technologies for each of them.

Amazon S3/EC2Google App EngineJoyentMicrosoft Azure(...)

If you don’t get the base right...

You don’t have a chance to look into the distance.

Data is your main product.

If you make it easy for people to reach, store and enrich data you have a good start.

Have total separation of information and display.

This allows you to offer information in a format that other people can innovate for you.

It also allows you to build in parallel and create a great experience for your end users.

Obvious things that will keep you from scaling:

1) Maintaining your own technical infrastructure.

2) Building a monolithic product rather than a modular system.

3) Lack of resources and manpower.

The third issue is easy to solve...

Do not re-invent the wheel but research what you can use and pick and mix.

http://winterolympicsmedals.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/feb/11/winter-olympics-medals-by-country

YQL    h>p://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/

YQL    h>p://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/

select {what} from {where} where {condi&ons}

select * from csv where url="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tpWDkIZMZleQaREf493v1Jw&output=csv" and columns="Year,City,Sport,Discipline,Country,Event, Gender,Type" and Year="1924"

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/wireframes/

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/builder/

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

Top tip - use the web to build for the web.

Use the web as your data source.

CMS

Don’t build your own login system!

For extra speed and less resource burning tweak the interface.

h>p://developer.yahoo.com/performance/

h>p://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Don’t fall into the personnel trap!

Churn of technical staff will slow down your product and cost you a lot.

Instead of relying on one wizard to do all the work, build a team.

This means people can get sick, can leave and you will still be around.

And it is a lot of free PR for your company - happy techies tell others to come.

Christian Heilmann http://wait-till-i.com http://developer-evangelism.com http://twitter.com/codepo8

Thanks!