Articles tagged with Iteration Speed

Missing the point about microservices: it's about testing and deploying independently

Ok, so I have to first preface this whole blog post by a few things:

1. I really struggle with the term microservices. I can’t put my finger on exactly why. Maybe because the term is hopelessly ill-defined, maybe because it’s gotten picked up by the hype train. Whatever. But I have to stick to some type of terminology so let’s just roll with it.
2. This blog post might be mildly controversial, but I’m throwing it out there because I’ve had this itchy feeling for so long and I can’t get rid of it. I respect it if you want to disagree vehemently, and maybe there’s something both of us can learn.
3. I have a weird story. My first “real” company, Spotify, used a service-oriented architecture from scratch. I also spent some time at Google which used a service-oriented architecture. So basically since 2006 I’ve been continuously working in what people now call a “microservice architecture”. It didn’t even occur to me that some people might want to build things as monoliths. So I guess I’m coming at it from a different direction than many other. Either way, there were particular non-standard reasons why Spotify and Google had to do this that I’ll get back to later.

Let’s start by talking about iteration speed!

Learning from users faster using machine learning

I had an interesting idea a few weeks ago, best explained through an example. Let’s say you’re running an e-commerce site (I kind of do) and you want to optimize the number of purchases.

Let’s also say we try to learn as much as we can from users, both using A/B tests but also using just basic slicing and dicing of the data. We are looking at how many people convert (buy our widgets) but a constant problem is there’s just too much uncertainty.

Optimizing for iteration speed

I’ve written before about the importance of iterating quickly but I didn’t necessarily talk about some concrete things you can do. When I’ve built up the tech team at Better, I’ve intentionally optimized for fast iteration speed above almost everything else. What are some ways we did that?

Iterate or die

Here’s a conclusion I’ve made building consumer products for many years: the speed at which a company innovates is limited by its iteration speed.

I don’t even mean throughput here. I just mean the cycle time. Invoking Little’s law this is also related to the total inventory of features not being deployed yet.