Faster! Faster!

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

2. Why am I here?

3. 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

4. First… a disclaimer • I’m a Pythonista • I’m a Djangonaut • Blame OSCON 2006

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

6. Cultures of stagnation

7. Risk aversion

8. Always choosing path well traveled

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

10. Dwelling on past investments

11. Over-management and review of new ideas

12. “We have too much real work to do.”

13. Cultures of Innovation Props to Josh Linkner

14. Fuel passion

15. Celebrate ideas

16. Foster autonomy

17. Encourage courage

18. Fail forward

19. Think small

20. Institutionalize this stuff

21. COTS vs. Open Source

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

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

24. Photo: Daleeast @ Flickr

25. Photo: Kethera @ Flickr

26. Rapid Prototypes

27. “If only I could show you!”

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

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

30. The Framework Showdown

31. 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

32. The challenge url = http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7138/7576110858_d66eec09f5_z.jpg width = 200 height = 200 Photo: Tomcrenshaw @ Flickr

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

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

35. 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

36. The non-scientific results

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

38. import cStringIO import requests from PIL import Image from flask import Flask, request, send_file app = Flask(__name__) @app.route('/', methods=['GET', ]) def resize(): url = request.values['url'] req = requests.get(url) resource = cStringIO.StringIO(req.content) image = Image.open(resource) image = image.resize((int(request.values['w']), int(request.values['h'])), Image.ANTIALIAS) resource = cStringIO.StringIO() image.save(resource, 'JPEG') resource.seek(0) return send_file(resource, mimetype='image/jpeg') if __name__ == '__main__': app.run(debug=True)

39. Quick and easy local server Django: manage.pyrunserver Flask: app.run()

40. Get boilerplate out of the way!

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

42. How do I share it?

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

44. What does this all mean?

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

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

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

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

49. Hold a few “hack days”

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