Lessons learned growing from 1 Million to 13 Million users in 9 months

Description

The amount of our personal data exhaust generated over the past few years is staggering, yet our ability to access it in a useful way has lagged behind. Timehop is a mobile app that exposes that data in a way that’s consumable and fun. Over the past nine months, we’ve grown from 1 million to 13 million users – with a bunch of 3am pages along the way.

Timehop’s technology stack looked a lot like any other startup’s stack: A single Ruby on Rails application deployed to Heroku using Postgres and some MongoDB. We now have a service-oriented architecture with a lot of Go and massively scaled datastore using DynamoDB.

In this talk, Benny Wong, cofounder and CTO of Timehop, will talk about how Timehop survived 13x growth in a matter of months. Specifically:

• Scaling as a function of capacity. You can only make apps so fast. (which leads to the next point)
• Measure everything. And then figure out what actually matters
• Be in the driver seat. A degraded experience is better than no experience
• Great engineers are not a “nice to have”
• Avoiding The Big Rewrite™. Chunk out the on-fire component pieces into manageable migrations. Make integration points easy and seamless (ie. using Resque job definitions)
• But! Don’t over-componentize and over-service-ize. It comes at a real cost (especially with only two backend engineers)
• Run the numbers and know when to pay the Pros™ (ie. DynamoDB)
• Simplify deployment