A talk Tommy and I presented at Geekcamp Indonesia 2015 #gc2015

1. Startup Engineering Culture
What Matters and What Does Not

2. Mohan Krishnan, Tommy Sullivan
• Working at KMKLabs for 2.1574 years
• Full-stack engineers
• Love writing software
Senaru, Lombok

3. KMKLabs.com/careers
Get in on this action!

4. WARNING!
• Anecdotal - our experience and theirs
• What works for us and them
• We don't do everything right
• Love to know what works for you

5. Culture

6. – Peter Thiel to Brian Chesky
paypal airbnb .
“Don’t f*** up the culture.”

7. Culture eats strategy for breakfast - Peter Drucker

8. Not culture,
practices
• Free food
• Rock climbing walls
• Cool posters
• Agile / Lean
• Programming
languages
• Tools
• Code standards…

9. Engineering culture:
• How we work together
• How we build things
• How we fail & ensure growth

10. Working together

11. Hiring
• People you want to
work with
• Team decides
• Cultural fit trumps
competency

12. Team over the individual
• startup is a team sport
• strong teams >
individual heroes
- heros burn out
• no toxic behavior, even
if you are a 10x
engineer
• cover for each other
“When the year starts the
objective is to win it all with
the team, personal records
are secondary.”

13. Over Communicate
• Transparent
• Self-organization
• Honest

14. morning standup

15. pair programming

16. evening show & tell

17. Honest
• Constructive feedback
over being “nice”
• Criticism is always valid
from their perspective

18. Transparency allows for self organization

19. Managers are servants to teams
• primary function:
facilitates, communicates,
coordinates
• needs to be taught &
inculcated
• not the only way to
progress career wise
• not every great engineer
will make a great manager

20. How we build things

21. Optimize for quick iterations
• Small frequent releases
• Embrace change
• Work with product to
phase features in small
parts
• TDD, Continuous
Integration & Deployment

22. Don’t drop engineering standards
• Professionals: zero
tolerance for bad code
• Shit code vs strategic
tech debt
• Quality is engineering
responsibility
• Challenges are not a
reason to throw away
standards

23. Boring over shiny technology
• Boring: mature technologies / tech already in your
production
• Develop deep competency in your production
stack
• Focus on the business, avoid hype
mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology-slides

24. Gartner Hype Cycle *
balance: allow for trying new technology by
ensuring we architecture for experimentation
chrisunderwoodsblog.com/2014/01/new-deal-trough-or-plateau
nginx, postgres
php, ruby
mongoDB
soap
nodejs, go

25. Avoid burnout
• We want people to have multi year careers
• Need work-life balance

26. Productivity vs hours worked
• 8 hours of productive
work > 16 hours of
some work, Facebook,
email, etc…
• Strict work hours
ensure strict free time
twitter.com/joshsusser/status/652540877160603648

27. How we fail & ensure growth

28. Never the same mistake
• Cover every bug with a test
• Post-mortems for incidents or downtime
• Regular retrospectives
😃 😕 😩

29. Invest for the future
• People
- 1:1 feedback
- mentoring
- training, Akademi KMK
• Community
- Participating
- Facilitating Events
- This!

30. “Thank you!”