nyc cto school s1 t2 cto tips & trix
DESCRIPTION
Session 1 Talk 2 of CTO School, Fall 2010TRANSCRIPT
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NextNY CTO School Fall 2010
Tips & TriXCollection of Random Thoughts
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Know when you are in over your head
Tell People, Find Mentors, Reach Out.
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Understand Your Domain
Read, Take Classes, learn the domain area you are in.
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Your job is to support the BUSINESS
That’s the ultimate way that you are judged – is the technology allowing the business to grow and fulfill its
objectives.
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Set Priorities for Team
Your developers have the responsibility to do things right. Your responsibility is to make sure they are doing the right things, which is more
important.
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Value of Information
As Co-Founder /Member of Exec Team, you have access to better information about where
business is going. That alone allows you to make technical tradeoffs much better than
even your best developer.
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Code Reuse
Plugins, Components, Libraries, Third-Party Software
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Understand Key Building Blocks• Content Management Systems• Queueing / Messaging Systems • Personalization • NoSQL Persistence • SOAP / REST / XML Processing • Portal-Like Systems • Authenticatoin / Authorization Systems • Knowledge Systems • Workflow Systems • Semantic Web Technologies • Web Scrapers • Cache Grids
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Automate As Much As Possible
Agility is a huge source of competitive advantage over established
companies.
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Delegation
Even if you are alone, delegate in clever ways. I.e. managed hosting, virtual admin, oDesk,
interns.
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Delegation
• Each task – think through – am I the best person to do it.
• If I am the best person to do it (for many tasks), do I NEED to do it?
• Build capacity over time, with giving larger and larger tasks.
• Have to accept others doing inferior job at times, but you need to set performance standards.
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Know (a bit of) Everything
You need to know “enough” abouteverything in your technology.
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Use Technology Appropriately
Don’t get seduced by cool technologies BUT
use cool technologies.
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Be an Expert in Your StackDo NOT be seduced by the fact that you can be
productive in your platform of choice very quickly. It takes a long time to learn best
practices. Mastery of the platform even more than mastery of the language.
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Quality is Relative
Find balance between short-term getting stuff done and long-term technical debt
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Prioritize Quality Correctly
• Different definitions depending on your maturity and size.
• If you have no users nobody cares if:– Your app is fast / slow / scalable – Your app is down / up– Your app is insecure / secure
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Find the 80/20 Solution
Find the key 20% of functionality that will get 80% of the value. (Eric Ries).
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Learn how to Hire
Hiring and spotting talent is a key skill for growing your team.
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Get a Life
Remember your startup is not the only important thing; in fact, there are many things
that are much more important
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Cultivate your networkFormer co-workers, college buddies,
meetups.
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Participate
• User Groups / Meetups• Mailing Lists / Forums• OSS Contributions• Public Speaking• Blogs• Hacker News / Reddit / Digg
• To a Point