TXJS: Harper’s Keynote Address

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:
  • 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.

One thought on “TXJS: Harper’s Keynote Address

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *