Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering, Intercom - Run less software

1. Rich Archbold @rich_archbold Senior Director of Engineering, Intercom

8. Dec 2012 June 2016June 2014 Asana Hipchat Slack

14. Money is Cheap Basic Execution is Easy Threat from one of The Four Talent is Scarce

16. Time well spent is when our top talent is focused and productive solving only our most important and differentiating challenges.

17. hethreepillarsof RunLessSoftware

18. Save Time Choose Standard technologies Save Time Outsource Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting Spend Time Create Enduring Competitive Advantage

21. 1. Choose Boring Technology Solve problems by constraining yourself, mostly but not exclusively, to solving them with a small opinionated, company-speciﬁc set of standard technologies, that over time you become an expert with. This will serve you well in the long run.

23. Total Cost = ∑ (Operations Cost) – ∑ (Velocity Beneﬁts)

24. Total Cost = ∑ (Operations Cost) – ∑ (Velocity Beneﬁts) Low Cost = ∑ (Easy & Cheap) – ∑ (Fast & Powerful)

25. Intercom Core Technologies Stored centrally by our CTO categorising standard and non standard technologies in use. 1. Document current practices 2. On-boarding 3. Highlighting the need for improvements

26. Technology Standard 😎 Non-Standard 🤔 1 Programming Languages Ruby & JavaScript Java, Go, Python, etc. 2 Compute AWS EC2 instances in our VPC GCE, Azure, Heroku 3 RDMS AWS RDS Aurora MySQL AWS PostgreSQL, Native MySQL, Spanner 4 Key Value Store AWS DynamoDB MongoDB, Cassandra, Bigtable 5 Metrics, Monitoring AWS CloudWatch, Datadog, Honeycomb Graphite, Librato, Prometheus 6 Queues & Streams AWS SQS & AWS Kinesis RabbitMQ, Kafka 7 Search Baremetal Elasticsearch AWS Elasticsearch, AWS Cloudsearch, Solr 8 Email Delivery Sparkpost AWS SES, PowerMTA, Postﬁx 9 Real Time Messaging Intercom Nexus Pubnub, Pusher 10 Messenger Intercom Messenger Layer.com

30. “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efﬁciency what should not be done at all.” Peter Drucker 1963

31. There's a lot of undifferentiated heavy lifting that stands between your idea and that success. 70% of your time, energy, and dollars go into the undifferentiated heavy lifting and only 30% of your energy, time, and dollars gets to go into the core kernel of your idea. I think what people are excited about is that they're going to get a chance they see a future where they may be able to invert those two. Jeff Bezos WEB 2.0 SUMMIT, 2006

32. DO outsource your Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting DO NOT outsource your Core Value Proposition

33. Things to consider when outsourcing 1. Security 3. Reliability 2. Flexibility 4. Cost

34. AWS Best-in-class public or late stage Companies (e.g. Stripe, Sparkpost, Datadog) Mid-stage Startups (e.g. Greenhouse, Keen IO, VividCortex) Young Startups (e.g. Honeycomb, Foxpass, Notion) Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 4

37. The things you own, end up owning you.

39. Theory in action

40. Scaling our User Storage system

41. Break problems down until they can be solved with standard technologies Build prototypes to eliminate risk TIP:

42. Make it easier, cheaper and faster to evolve our Inbox

43. People are “harder” and more important than technology strategy TIP:

44. Almost ﬁnished

47. What’s the prize?

49. Years from $1M to $100M ARR

52. heEnd

Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering, Intercom - Run less software

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Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering, Intercom - Run less software