Why do some Startups make the difference so fast?
I am not an entrepreneur or a high-level manager, but in the eyes of an engineer I would like to share some insides.
Many should be thinking programming languages or specific technologies will be the theme of this post. I hope I do not disappoint my fellows, but definitely this does not seem to have relevance in the history of impressive projects. Who would have spoken a few years ago that PHP could be the difference for Facebook or Python as the engine of YouTube. These examples constantly surprise us, I speak of us engineers who defend programming languages, technologies and methodologies with great persuasion. If technologies were not determinant in the success or failure, what characteristics drive success?
Modestly I believe in the good old advisor: move quickly and run with quality.
Moving quickly is definitely one of the most complex features for large companies, making any group of young engineers a powerful competitor.
Performing with a focus on quality has always been an opinion about who evaluates, but numbers often say more than criticism. So what lessons can we learn today.
How to get a result in less time?
Looking about some cloud providers I realize that there are many shortcuts, technologies that reduce the time to build any software or service, but many companies look at these services and think:
If one day we want to migrate, we will be tied to this? Are we going to have to change part of our code?
For both questions Yes, the risk exists and it is not less than a group of new developers do before you and you only have to watch the success of another emerging Startup!
If we look only at the Google Cloud Platform we can choose these options to run a code in Node.js: Cloud Functions (Serverless), App Engine (PaaS), Container Engine (Kubernetes) or Compute Engine (Virtual Machines).
All these services can deliver the same result, but with different levels of complexity.
The question that remains: Has your company made this assessment? If the answer was: I believe yes or maybe, be careful someone will be more judgmental at the time of this definition and can skip a few months ahead of you with a smaller team and with a smaller investment.
How to run with higher quality?
The answer about this question is must think of the meaning of quality. Running a project focused on a POC (Proof of Conception), MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or a new release are different targets, but all of them go through the user experience. I know that for us engineers we always think of tests, clean code, organization, but all this is what you should be worrying in the first day and never stop more. These concerns permeate any software and have continued forever, make no mistake it will only get more difficult. Now we must understand that the architecture and the environment that runs this software defines how this code should be resilient.
Nowadays any junior developer in his room can change the world. It has never been so easy and cheap to make a difference. We never had so much information and knowledge as we have today. While your Startup continues with this feature you don’t need scared.
