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

Photo: Tomcrenshaw @ Flickr

url = http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7138/7576110858_d66eec09f5_z.jpgwidth = 200height = 200

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

import cStringIO

import requestsfrom PIL import Imagefrom 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)

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/