Features of creating a turnkey web project from Startup Makers

As part of the ongoing conference GeekWeek-2015, we communicate with our speakers. Today Denis Izmailov, CEO of Startup Makers, is already known to many of you for his articles DenisIzmaylov

Denis, you have been doing web development for more than 15 years. Tell me, what is the reason for such a stable attachment to one direction?

Unfortunately, it is web development that I have been doing for not 15, but 13 years. :) In the summer of 1998, I discovered programming and a year later I became interested in developing software for Windows. And a little later - even creating your own operating system. Then I did not have access to the Internet. It was a distant Siberia. And in the spring of 2002, fate brought me to an amazing person. He opened for me the possibilities of Web, Apache, PHP. Having made several experimental projects, I saw that my abilities to research, self-study, creation and beautiful can be interesting and useful to a large number of people. It is exciting and inspiring when your growth and results are pleasing and beneficial to society.

What kind of amazing person are you talking about? Do I understand correctly that this is a kind of first teacher and mentor? Can you tell more about it?

You can not teach, you can only learn. Manuk Astaturyan is a rare person, my age mate. Then not only the Internet, but the technology as a whole was far from the place where I lived. But he and I stood out for our obsession with them. When we were introduced - we talked for several hours without stopping, sharing with each other our vision, ideas and knowledge. We have been friends since that day. He has a wonderful family and a kind mother. :)

How exactly did you see that your knowledge can be interesting and useful to others?

There are two sides here. On the one hand, this is the knowledge that I actively acquire in research and is ready to share it. On the other - the ability to apply them and intuition, allowing you to make better versions of products. The first one is simple - they turned to me for help, I solved people's problems. At the same time, I implemented the ability to apply knowledge in a variety of ways.

First project

At that time, the global Internet was not as diverse as it is now, and at the same time it was a great pleasure. Therefore, almost everyone sat in the regional Intranet networks. We had two resources - a chat and a hosting of home pages (Home Page). Many have managed this resource strangely and without enthusiasm.

I rethought the structure of the approaches taken then and made an intuitively pleasant site. By the way, a year later, Facebook implemented a similar design, which we basically see today (this is not a joke — archive.org remembers everything). On this site I have collected interesting people content. In the same place he published software that he did in his free time and which was popular by local standards.
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Later, the people I helped gave me a full-fledged hosting. There I created my chat, as an alternative to the general, for those who were not satisfied with the speed of its work. He had the same opportunities (the possibility of changing topics and even his own bot, which maintained dialogue with people when there were few guests), but was neaterly decorated. Details are very important. There was also a simple social network inside. It was 2003, I needed to prepare for final exams at school, plus I got a job at the science lab in parallel. I left the project to live my life.

Final choice

For the last 5 years of your work, you have focused on Front-end, Node.js and architecture. What caused such a choice?

I have always been captivated by potential and growth. Working 5 years ago on an infrastructure project for the Polish office of the Nokia-Siemens Network and on a travel startup for the western market, I noticed how many possibilities are opened by modern browsers and how requests for functionality are growing inside JavaScript applications. At the same time, the role of the server part fades into the background in importance and becomes quite typical, and therefore easily replaceable. By the way, after some time such phenomena? both BaaS (Backend as a service) and Parse.com service have confirmed this hypothesis.

He noted how the gap between the JavaScript environment and the “classic” server environment, such as PHP or Java, is growing, while JavaScript, with a few exceptions, is much closer to human thinking.
Given all this and the fact that the user interacts with the interface? whatever the perfect (or imperfect) Backend, because without a good UX, the project will not “fly” —I made the final choice.

Startup Makers and their turnkey design principles

Tell me, what does Startup Makers have in the concept of turnkey web project development?

If very briefly - bring the project from the current state to the target result. Development, especially custom, today has become a consulting. Its results are always tied to the business. Problems arise when a rupture occurs, for example, in the form of a large and fuzzy TK, several levels of subcontractors and their geographical distribution (which affects the quality criteria, cultural code and introduces the difference of interpretations of certain words), resulting in a product that for use and maintenance. This can often be seen in the public sector and Enterprise.

We prefer live contact:

• Deploy the development facing the people.
• To speak with the client in his language, to understand what goals he really wants to achieve.
• Conduct interviews with end users, taking into account their picture of the world and, when possible, the cultural code.

External accompanying documents and process are highly dependent on the customer and the project.
If this is a startup or product for pre-sale, then it is important to do it quickly, for the minimum number of HADI-cycles due to the limited amount of resources at the start. It means to be the most accurate in planning and evaluation, and effective in implementation. At the same time make the product at a serious level and, preferably, beyond expectations. This is greatly helped by a large number of developments and recruited over the years, technological and UX-expertise.

Communication with startups via User Journey, visual prototypes of low (wireframes) and high (UI) resolutions, API specifications (especially when there is already a Back-end) is usually enough to start.

Task management can go both in the client system, and through Trello, Pivotal Tracker or JIRA, depending on the scale of the project. At the exit, the customer receives a work product, which can then be followed by even a mid-level programmer.

On the other hand, if the customer is an existing business or Enterprise, bringing a new product to the market or restarting an existing one, then it is important to consider all the risks, reliability, meeting deadlines, understanding at all levels of structures and integration into existing business processes. An additional language of communication is the diagrams DFD, IDEF0. Sometimes it becomes necessary to do a technical task with PMI (program and testing methodology), the passage of which is the criterion for the completion of a design project and the start of a commissioning project.

If the customer is a development department or service station of companies, then the communication language with them is quite democratic, at the level of DFD, architectural schemes, API specifications and tests.

As a rule, they order web services and at the output they want to receive ready-made npm-packages for self-deployment and clear documentation for maintenance. Processes are built on Agile. If the project is long, then the Scrum methodology is used.

How much time can a project take and what difficulties appear in the process of development and coordination most often?

From two weeks to 6 months. As a rule, difficulties arise with creative clients who prefer to influence the process, instead of paying attention to product research, conducting interviews with users, analytics and preparing the necessary data. But we are flexible. We are ready to advise.

Do you do everything in the company yourself, or do you outsource some of the work? If the last option - what work do you keep for yourself and do you have in your arsenal, in addition to technology, any useful tools for managing large projects?

Mostly we do everything ourselves. Often we attract talented and strong guys from cool projects to individual tasks. Weight and connections in the professional community allow it. We take advice from top experts. But architecture, management and quality control are always reserved. Feel free to redo some parts if something went wrong. In addition, proper decomposition and risk management allows you to do it safely.

The very idea of ​​Startup Makers is that we have top-end market expertise and a large number of developments from dozens of projects. There is a constantly updated platform that allows you to quickly launch new web projects. There are heroic engineers who are no longer interested in support, but it is interesting to run something new on current technologies, and which can make supported decisions. And to do this more effectively than the so-called “old stable technologies”.

On the other hand, there are startups and large companies that launch new products. To find enough professional developers in the current conditions, and at the same time to cope with their management is, let's be honest, a question of a lot of time and good luck. We can close this question completely, providing them with the best expertise, the most current technologies, best practices and hands. In other words, we can take care of all the technological issues of web projects.

Denis spoke at the conference with the topic “ Current technologies and trends in web development ”. You can watch the video of the speech at the end of the conference here .

The conference will last until November 22.
And live, you can participate right now .