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Ask HN: How would you fix this failing startup?
Suppose that you've joined a small startup as the new CTO. This startup has a lot of users but its quality of service is terrible. Their website and apps are slow and they fail left and right.
How do you find the cause of all problems and fix them? And more importantly, how do you make sure they never happen again in future?
P.S: The tech stack is not important here. I'm interested to know your approach and management practices that you'd implement.
- karmakaze 6y agoHow do you know tech stack isn't contributing? > apps are slow and they fail left and right Better tooling can improve performance and reduce errors. > approach and management practices that you'd implement What approach and management practices are currently used?
- thenewcto 6y ago> What approach and management practices are currently used? As far as I've seen, they don't have any in place.
- watt 6y agoThis will happen again and will always happen if product is prioritized above sound technology base. Any time something is developed incurring tech debt. To solve, the company will need to go into investment phase again. Invest into sound technology, paying off all the tech debt, building resilience and self-healing into services. Product development will suffer, but that's how debt works.
- thenewcto 6y agoAs I said, this is not much of a technical issue, but lack of processes and best practices. The codebase does not look very bad. > building resilience and self-healing into services How would you do that?
- watt 6y agoCircuit breakers, retries, back-off. Monitoring, heartbeat detection, automated restarts when service is unhealthy. Here's a no-nonsense paper, and a lot can be relevant to a smaller company too: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton/hamilton.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/...
- icedchai 6y agoI'd start with monitoring: performance, error logging, general infrastructure. You can't fix the problems if you don't know what's actually happening.
- kanobo 6y agoYou should read The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, you basically described it's premise. It's a pretty good novel that describes how DevOps practices can help a company dig itself out of the hole you describe.