the next big thing (freelancer.com) - webgeek devcup

Peter Phillips

Director of Engineering

Freelancer.com

email: peter@freelancer.com

twitter: @freelancer

The Next Big Thing You are here

Source: Internet World Stats & United Nation

It’s 2012.

World Population

6,970,000,000

Number on the Internet

2,080,000,000 (30.0%)

70% The other

of the world’s population are

about to join the Internet.

North America

266 million users

77.4% penetration

Europe

475 million users

58.4% penetration

Latin America

204m (of 592)

34.5% penetration

Africa

110m (of 1014m)

10.9% penetration

Asia

825m (of 3834m)

21.5% penetration

Worldwide Internet Penetration 2011

One of the first things they are doing is looking to raise their economic

status.

And it’s never been easier to learn a trade.

Free Stanford Course in AI. Over 170,000

enrolled, 8x the total number of

students at Stanford.

We are the global labor exchange

We connect businesses with skilled freelancers. Globally.

13 Bids US $251

Mathematical modelling for chemical engineering

Pakistan

Bangladesh

Germany

India

UK degree, 2yr exp.

Uni student

Indian company

Chemical engineer

Who is bidding?

➔ Started in 2004

➔ World’s largest outsourcing marketplace

➔ ~ 4,100,000 users from >234 countries/regions

➔ ~ 2,400,000 posted projects to date

➔ ~ $610,000,000 through site to date

➔ In top 300 websites globally (Alexa)

Freelancer.com

Freelancer Globally

Below:

Amazon.com

Apple.com

MSN.com

Bing.com

BBC

Etc..

Freelancer.com is huge in the developing world. Now ranks 21st in Bangladesh (155m population)

Freelancer technology stack

EC2

Elastic Compute Cloud

S3

Simple Storage Service

EBS

Elastic Block Store CloudFront

IAM

Identity and Access Management

Cloud Computing – Amazon Web Services

A few tech statistics

➔ Between 10-15k users on-site at any time

➔ > 90 instances (c1.xlarge, m1.xlarge, m2.2xlarge) (high cpu, high memory)

➔ > 15TB of EBS storage

➔ > 450GB of S3 storage (in 20-40KB files!)

➔ Our databases serve: > 310M requests per day > 678G of returned results traffic per day

➔ Our web hosts serve > 29M HTTP requests per

day

Development

➔ EBS snapshots for working with current, production scale data

➔ Spin up new instances / services on-demand

➔ Shadow instances for burning in builds

Measure, measure, and measure again

➔ Measure every change

➔ Track every metric you can

➔ Split test as much as possible

➔ Close the feedback loop

➔ Catch things early

➔ Lots of small course corrections

➔ .. Then you don’t need as many big ones!

Continuous refinement / improvement

Additional requirements

Usability refactoring

Strip unnecessary features

Performance improvements

WTF?! $#@ change it all !

Wait, not that either..

“Under new management”

Let’s just use the spec as is ..

If it doesn’t build … don’t ship it … if it breaks FIX IT ! ➔ Buildbot

➔ Jenkins

➔ Pulse

Testing – Continuous Integration

➔ fabric

➔ Capistrano

➔ Percona Toolkit

➔ Facebook’s gatekeeper

Deployment

We deploy, on average, at least 4-5 times a day

Creativity matters

(Q1 2012 Hackathon)

… but not as much as code

(Q4 2011 Hackathon)

There’s never been a better time to start a company…

… or join ours!

We’re Hiring in Sydney and Makati!

➔ Product Managers

➔ Testing Engineers

➔ UI / UX designers

➔ Software Engineering

Web Development

Systems Architecture

www.freelancer.ph

peter@freelancer.com