These days there are great tools to measure everything that occurs in your site. Clicks, reading time, loading times, errors and so forth. And we care about the video content on our websites in the same way… right?
If you have an MP4 on your site. Please let me know if this is something for you and/or if you need help integrating.
In our situation, which is a relatively small company, it's used to keep people energized, focused and well... happy.
Without it, we had regular team meetings where people talked about frustrations they had (and it exploded at times).
I don't think having it around as way to fire someone is the right approach.
I'm a huge fan of more informal one-on-one meetings. To the point where I will consider a move if I'm not getting enough time with my management. I don't consider those "performance reviews" though.
Although we try to stay away from "creating a process" for everything, we've gradually implemented a way for people to give feedback more organically. The thing is, it's not the tool, form or questions you hand out - it's how people use them and think about them.
Over a period of time we started using Impraise (impraise.com), although it's not the best tool - it helps people to force to take the time and leave there current mindset to focus on something like giving feedback (on an equal base, because some people are just very good at giving feedback and keep on talking, while others are struggling and need to write it down). Every quarter, you review 2 other people. People read it, interpret it and carry on. However, I sit down with them after everyone has filled in the questions on Impraise (which are not the default ones, but they're pretty straightforward, like: "how good is the quality of your colleague's work?"). This information is used as a base to allow me to ask even more questions, like: "do you agree with this statement?" or "what could you do to improve this situation this colleague is describing?”. The result of this conversation are 4 things:
1. self reflection,
2. setting personal goals (which is mostly one of the things from the self reflection, getting more focus/attention than other things, which is not shared within the team),
3. create and/or help out with team goals, something we should improve as a team and shared within the team,
4. feedback on the process itself.
These results are written down as notes and then reflected on the next time we sit down.
We have some other tools, methods and things in place to have more of a continuous feedback loop - but it remains a living thing, rather than a set in stone method. If you have questions, you're always welcome to contact me :-)
Hi David, interesting to read your post. My name is Bas Kohnke, co-founder/CEO of Impraise (YC Summer 14). We are always looking for new ways to improve our product, so please feel free to reach me at bas@impraise.com if you are willing to share your experience and ideas. Thanks!
After multiple side projects with Lambda (e.g. image processing services), we finally implemented it on larger scale. Initially we started out without any framework or tool to help, because there we pretty much non-existent at that time. We created our own tool, and used Swagger a lot for working with API gateway (because it is really bad to work with). Over time everything smoothened out and really worked nicely (except for API Gateway though). Nowadays we have everything in Terraform and Serverless templates, which really makes your life easier if you're going to build your complete infrastructure on top of AWS Lambda and other AWS APIs. There are still a bunch of quarks you have to work with, but at the end of the line: it works and you don't have to worry much about scaling.
I'm not allowed to give you any numbers; here's an old blogpost about Sketch Cloud: https://awkward.co/blog/building-sketch-cloud-without-server... (however, this isn't accurate anymore). For this use-case, concurrent executions for image uploads is a big deal (a regular Sketch document can easily exist out of 100 images). But basically the complete API runs on Lambda.
Running other languages on Lambda can be easily done and can be pretty fast, because you simply use node to spawn a process (Serverless has lots of examples of that).
Let me know if you have any specific questions :-)
Well, using it manually is just cumbersome. API Gateway is not specifically designed for Lambda, so it has lots of settings which you would think are just default for building your API. Using it through Cloudformation or Serverless is way easier.
Sorry to hear. I think it's admiring to see how you tried to build a product, but lack of selling/marketing always creates a bump in the road to a successful product.
We're currently using Slack. It supports both IRC and XMPP, has a webinterface and bouncers. It also gives you more detailed stats about the users, has integrations with other services and so on: https://slack.com/r/024fus8f-02566qu1 (shameless referral link.. k, thx, bye).
If you have an MP4 on your site. Please let me know if this is something for you and/or if you need help integrating.