Ori Lahav’s IL Tech Talks initiative definitely helped in promoting this in our community.
That’s why we happily hosted a full week of those tech talks at PicScout.
We learned a lot: From understanding client side performance, best development practices (here and here), scaling (here and here) to lean practices and management skills.
Amazingly, it appears that “good” things are somehow “reproduced” among the companies. The talks revealed that successful companies are build from the same “forces” in terms of practices and vision. These are exactly the same things we have done and continue to pursue at PicScout.
Unit testing, TDD and Continuous Delivery seems to free business and technology to move safely and together towards the goal. It was quite obvious from Wix’s and Outbrain’s experiences.
For us, being one of the scalable companies in Israel (in terms of billions image recognitions a month), it was very interesting to see others views on scalability.
Specifically (and personally), I would mention here the lecture by Eran Sandler.
Building a truly scalable architecture is hard. Sometimes, it isn’t even necessary till the right conditions are met. Eran’s lecture, introduced small and measured steps to gain scalability without re-writing the code.
Lean techniques (presented skillfully by Elad Sofer) made us to re-enforce our approach of continuous improvement. Building effective communication, seeking and eliminating waste and design for simplicity (yet “useful” products) are skills we all need to embrace and to grow.
Here are some (but not all) of our feedbacks:
Ilya: Once again I have got a validation on how Continuous Delivery and TDD help to create better software - talking about “Building a web infrastructure for 10M users”
Sharon: New ideas on management that will be tested soon ;) - talking about “Team Up”
Merav: Sometimes Agile principles perceived as the new management panacea; Understanding that those principles are here to serve you in a long term is what important - talking about “Lean Software Development”
Arik: I definitely learnt a few new best practices to make our web sites more effective - talking about “Web Performance 101”
We would like to thank all the presenters, who contributed from their own time to present and to share with us their real life experiences!
