Doing more with less people at ScaleCamp

The first ScaleCamp talk I attended was about scaling people. Ed Freyfogle of property search engine Nestoria presented the talk. Nestoria is run by a small group of people who all sit together and get things done. I find it interesting because they are doing the whole thing in perl. This is how :

  • Work smarter, not harder. Easy to say. In this case it means doing less better, instead of more things, more quickly.
  • 'No fires' policy bad news is fine but don't make it a surprise
  • Have a process any process is better than no process. They take days out to accomplish things, e.g. speed day, ops day.
  • Adapt the process (and have one process).
  • Make your team easy to join. Make generating documentation easy, build clean interfaces.
  • Reuse (unless you don't understand it) and make time to give back.
  • Get other people to do your work with smart outsourcing and intern projects.
  • don't skimp on training, events, fun projects or hardware.
  • hire good people. A high bar to entry helps make sure you don't cause problems for yourself.
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