Developing your £5 App

fivepoundapp.com

Disclaimers

• “There is no silver bullet” - Fred Brooks
• Some of this is obvious/common sense
• I'm not your mommy

Developing your £5 App

• Getting going
  • The idea
  • Motivation
  • Choosing tech
• Sticking at it
  • Best practices
  • Not messing up
  • Time
• Scaling up
  • Scaling out
  • Performance/optimisation
  • Teams

Getting Going

• You've got a day job
• Need an idea you can tackle
• Has to be feasible
• Ruminate, think, plan
• Motivation

Getting Going

• Language choice
  • What you know
  • “Industry standard”
  • “Beating the averages” - Paul Graham
  • Lisp, Erlang, Haskell, Smalltalk?
• Frameworks
• Target platform
  • May limit your choices
  • Matters less for web-apps
• Deployment/Distribution/Hosting
  • Can you actually get it in people's hands?

Sticking at it

• Prototype
• Best practices
  • Source control (e.g. SVN)
  • Automated tests (aka your QA department)
  • Code conventions/be tidy (you'll be maintaining it)
• Less code
• Administration/Security
• Don't let it get onerous

Scaling up

• Gaining a team
• Profiling/performance
  • “premature optimization is the root of all evil” - C.A.R. Hoare
  • “mature optimization”
• Architecture
• Less code (again)
• Scaling web-apps:
  • Been done before
  • LAMP scaling out
  • memcached
• Plan for it (a bit?)

Conclusion

• If it all goes wrong, at least you'll have learnt something
• The technical stuff matters, but so does everything else
• Less code

Discuss