What I Learned About Going Fast at Ebay & Google
summary
eBay real-time search, Google App Engine (hosting 3 million App Engine apps including Snapchat), and Kixeye games form the evidence for what actually speeds teams: hire A players, run blame-free post‑mortems, and let small service teams own clear SLAs. A three‑person team builds a microservice chassis, transport layer, CI/CD pipeline and 15 minutes from no code to running service using Netflix OSS and Asgard red‑black deploys. Machine‑learned ranking and site‑speed A/B experiments add ~2% revenue each (~$250M combined); canary releases, automated tests and a single monorepo enforce quality.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction and background
- 1:22The necessity of speed
- 3:02People and hiring strategy
- 6:06The Google hiring process
- 8:49Respecting skill differences
- 10:47Anti-patterns in development
- 14:19Quality over quantity
- 17:30Fostering a learning culture
- 19:36Blame-free post-mortems
- 24:04Service-oriented team structure
- 29:34Autonomy and responsibility
- 34:45Collaboration across teams
- 38:46Constant iteration
- 40:34Value of experimentation
- 44:00Quality as a priority
- 45:42Inculcating discipline
- 48:21Conclusion and recap
