Lesson: Intro to Hacking with Greg Osuri

Step: #3 The Process: Build, test, repeat

So, right now, if you look at why hacking is very important for innovation, it's because it's way easier to get data, collect data, process, host and also integrate with other products. If you think about what was five years ago, and what you see now, it's just beyond simpler.

With that in the marketplace I think, putting together something really fast, and getting to the results really fast. It's very important for a start-up. Especially because you want to have x amount of cycles that can burn, with the resources and the capital that you have at hand. You can't sit and expect people to like what you build, but rather you've got to ship your products really quick and take that pretty valuable feedback.

So it becomes extremely important for start-ups. If you look at enterprises, hackathons especially, are are the key innovation drivers, especially in for tech and non techs. If you look at PayPal. PayPal has a formal program, both in PayPal and Ebay that encourages people to build. To take time off from their regular work and everything, and go build one-off solutions because, they recognize the employees of PayPal are well connected with the competitor than the executive sitting on top.

PayPal's point-of-sales system came out from a hackathon. An employee of PayPal hacked it up, presented it to the board, the judges were all, you know, PayPal members and they were like, "Yeah, this is great". They went and formulated a product around it. You don't get that sitting on a board room.

Continuous delivery is a phenomenon where your entire organization including – most certainly the development, but also including infrastructure is delivered on a continuous basis. So it's making changes, adding stuff and removing stuff from your infrastructure from your code and being able to deploy that and see it immediately in production, is what continuous delivery means.

So, I'll give you an example. We had a formal process, we have six people on the team and we had this agile process where we write a story and someone estimates in a point system, using a pivotal tracker. We associate one point for about two hours and about two points for about four hours and three points and so on and so forth. People start working on it, people contribute to the code. The moment you push your code to the code repository, it gets deployed into service and immediately our users get to see the feature.

The feature will have been cooked up, literally, I would have thought about it a night before - and the next thing I do is write this requirement and before I go back to sleep, I have that introduction in front of users.

So, I think that is continuous delivery in my sense, getting the speed, which is super essential for running a start-up.