In his Keynote Address at Texas JavaScript 2013, presenter Harper Reed, former CTO at Obama Biden Election Headquaters, talked about his experiences and lessons learned based on three overiding themes: build a great team, practice for failure, and faciliate community.

• On hacking:
  • Recommends reading Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
  • Hacking is sharing, opennes, collaboration, and engaging in the
    Hands On Imperative (where “making is thinking”).
• Worked at Threadless, an online t‑shirt company. 
  • We invented crowdsourcing.
  • We take a design and put it on a shirt.
  • Four steps to working at Threadless: 
    • Design a shirt
    • Submit a shirt
    • Scoring of the shirt from community
    • Cash money.
  • Result:
    • 100k of shirts submitted
    • Millions of tee shirts sold
    • Grew from revenue of $x millions to $xx millions
    • We did none of the hardwork
    • The crowd and community did the hard work which was fun
    • Our team was able to focus on product, not on technology
    • I had accomplished my goals at Threadless, I quit
• Went on Vision Quest and got hired by Obama Biden Campaign team
• The Obama re-election team transitioned from politically-tight
  people to engineering focused.
  • For 2012, they need something different to the shock of
    others: “hired engineers to do enginnering”.
    • Hired ~40 engineers and ~120 tech staff in 18 months fromall over to “web scale”
    • Started out with zero, just pile of code.
  • Execution, couldn’t get fancy 
    • We invested early and built platform called Narwhal
    • Narwhal is a focus on bottom foundation.
    • It wasn’t an app, as the press liked to have believed,but the name for all of our APIs
    • With the API foundation in place, we can build toolsincluding: 
      • Call tool Mobile apps, Contribute. Social
      • Dashboard
      • Mobile apps
      • Contribute
      • Social
    • In total, there were ~290 products, deployed weekly on1,000s of servers
  • We used any technology that was able to solve the problem. 
    • This included Python, Ruby, MySQL, StatesD, Graphite,Puppet, Vagrant,… pretty much all the things!
    • We weren’t a “Python shop” or a “PHP shop” or whatevertehcnology of the month was as we didn’t want to stopanyone from using what technology they wanted to use.
    • Instead, we foucsed on what simply solves the problem. 
      • For example. Dashboard was done in Node.js since weliked what that community was doing.
  • We invested heavily in user experience 
    • User experience heavy investment 
      • We talked to users to help build products that wereusable and not merely functional.
      • Performed a lot of A/B testing, which allowed us tounderstand where we were wrong
      • Did you know that the Groundhog Day movie is reallyismulti-variant testing?
      • Fail Safety
        • Early in the campaign had chance to see the last Shuttle launch.
        • The goal of fail safety when we were sending people on shuttles is to get people into space without killing them.
        • Error states should always be helpful or where a user has the potential to be lost or hurt.
        • 404 pages should redirect people to different parts of the site and ask users to do different work
        • Users are not stuck in a fail state
    • Practiced gamedays
      • For a month, called “October”, they practicedpotential scenarios where items and compenents of thesuite of tools would fail.
      • On Election Day, there were no more changes. 
        • Since people were trained and knew what to do, there wasn’t any politics.
      • Gameday entails:
        • Destroying all of our applications
        • Destroying our database
        • Seeing how we needed to patch things
        • Then the next day Amazon’s cloud services went down on the East Coast and we were prepared to handle it.
        • The AWS rule: “If netflix is down, you are down too, if netflix is up, but you are down — you are screwed.”
    • Facilitate community
      • Users are the power behind your brand and is oftenunderestimated in developing it.
      • For example, moderation is hard to do and no onereally enjoys it. 
        • Insert a flag button to allow users to let you know when something about the site or other user’s contribution isn’t appropriate.
        • This empowers your community to moderate your content
        • Sort of like Minecraft for social web sites
      • This allows for the building an environment of trust. 
        • You have to create a place users can flourish
  • Working with teams is hard. 
    • “Manage by your outbox, not your inbox” — Larry Bacow
      • Often times we wait for people to email us and whatwe really need to do is reach out to them.
      • Send out simple emails by 9am every morning and,surprisingly, they write back.
    • Diversity in the workplace is important. 
      • He found the time with the most diversity have begetthe most innovation.
      • We do crazier stuff and build value for a lot morepeople.
    • Roll forward. Never roll back.” * Etsy 
      • Rolling back code was emotionally draining.
      • Instead, add and fix code to move forward.
• Lessons learned from his experience as a hacker and manager include: 
  • Building a great team isn’t straightforward or easy: 
    • After exerting so much effort into building a team,sometimes you need to let people go and don’t be afraidto do that.
    • Poisonous people can ruin teams, but don’t drop therelationship. That person might be good on the nextproject
    • Hire people that are better than you 
      • People that are A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s
  • Knowing that we could throw things away, we didn’t document
    as much:
    • We tried to do dilerberate code.
    • A lot of Harper’s job was managing trust including askedto be at weekly internal meetings with Obama relectionexecutives letting them know things were okay.
  • Practice for failure: 
    • Failing sucks, but important.
    • Instead, work at being terrible at failing.
  • Create an environment worth trusting and remember to SHIP
    PRODUCT:
    • You will feel better for having deployed code.
    • Your customers will feel better seeing progress.
    • And your team will feel that they aren’t just working forthemslves and producing.