A year in the life of a Grails startup

A year in the life of a Grails startup

Tomas Lin@tomaslin [email protected]

Donovan [email protected]

Secret EscapesGrails Exchange 2011

Saturday, 10 December 11

mailto:[email protected]




•We will focus on the lessons we learned working with and changing a Grails application over a year in a London startup.

•Focus: Technology, People, Processes.


Agenda•Who is Secret Escapes?

• Before / After we launched the site

• A work environment around Grails

• Success / Challenges / The future

• Questions?


Secret Escapes• Best members-only travel site for the UK

• VC-funded ( just closed series-B )

• From founders of Dealchecker.co.uk

• More than 1 million happy users + growing

• Started with 3 full time staff in November 2010, growing to 25 in January


Architecture

• 2 Apps - CMS and StoreFront

• Domain classes, shared services, controllers and views live in one plugin.

• StoreFront and CMS live on different servers.


Before Launch - Goals• Make app easy to deploy

• Get enough tests to make it work

• Basic CMS

• Integrate third party tools quickly

• Ship!


January, 2011Site is Launched

( Yes, you can build a fully transactional website with Grails in 4 months )


After Launch• Growing existing features - Booking engine.

• Third party integration - Facebook, Google tracking, plugins.

• Build better tools for business - allocation uploading, customer support.

• Pulling data out of the system.

• Integrate with other sites.

• Validate effect of changes ( A/B tests ).


Brief timeline• End Of January - launch

• 1st Half of the year - CMS / CRM improvements, Affiliates, Calendar Booker.

• 2nd Half - Better invitation system, exclusive deals, custom theming, third Party Integration, A/B testing, Better design.


Brief timeline• End Of January - launch

• 1st Half of the year - Easier to work with codebase as a team. Growing the team. (Jenkins, Amazon Beanstalk, Git )

• 2nd Half - Making team better. Devotion to testing. ( Unit testing, Integration testing, agile, pairing )


Growing features-Dealing with Changing

Domain Models


Before

After

HotelFixed DateDropDrown

Fixed DateFlexible DatesHotelPackagesTravel OnlyBy Departure

More Flexible Bookings


Database Migrations• Use the dbm-gorm-diff mechanism

• Set default values via the sql( ) command

• Load automatically on application startup

• Add date of migration so that it is easier to sort / merge across git branches


Integrating with Third Party Services


Improve Tracking

•Google Goals Tracking

•Google eCommerce Tracking

•Google Analytics

•Third Party Tracking Tags


Third Party Integrations

• Try to capture as much as possible in one standalone plugin

• Write tests within the plugin so you don’t have to worry about it working in the app

• Use tag libraries to make your GSP files very clean

• Publish plugins for feedback / sharing


Our Plugins• Email Validator - Email Syntax.

• Inviter - Handles inviting friends from Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook, Windows Live, LinkedIn, etc.

• Website Optimizer - A/B Testing.

• CDN Resources - Adds pull-down CDN support for resources plugin.


CMS - Going beyond scaffolding


Better Customer Support


RemoteLink to Actions


Easier to add data


Easy to Customize


• Put into a domain classes

• Use bean fields plugin to manage changes.

• Use one template for edit and new actions.

•Mail templates, Sales, Affiliates, Themes.


Getting data out for analysis


Reporting

• We inherited a reporting framework from Dealchecker Applications.

• Allows you to either write a grails service or use a SQL statement.

• Can add additional query parameters like sale / affiliate, etc.

• Exports to Excel.


Dashboard


CMS Lessons• Move things that will change into a Domain

Object in the CMS.

• Build batch operations for editing data.

• Use g:remoteField for quick edit items.

• Use the Console Plugin

• Use Bean Fields

• Work with Excel / CSV.


Some interesting techwe built -

Stuff other people never seem to talk about


Custom Theming Apps

• We keep all our customizations in a Theme domain object.

• Partners can overwrite our site defaults via a CSS file and a JS file.

• Use image references in CSS files to make it easy to change.

• Themes are loaded by domain name or url parameter


What can you change?• Application Name.• Domain Name• Theme CSS file • Theme JavaScript file • Favicon.• An URL to redirect

Technical Support• Email• Phone Number

Embedded Header of Footer• A header URL• A footer URL

Social Networks• Name of Facebook Page• Description for application• Image for Sale Now• Color for Sale Title• Color for destination

Text displayed for staticpages on the Site

• About Us• Contact Us• Faq• Terms and Conditions• Privacy Policy• Current Sales Sidebar

Email Templates• Title • Background Color• Header Text• Header Logo• Footer Signature• Footer Text• Blurb Title• Blurb Test• Title Color

Paypal Payment Page• Background Color• Background Image• Footer Text Color• Header Background Color• Header Height• Font for the Logo• Color of the Logo Font• Logo Image• Logo Image Position• Logo Text• Order Summary Background Color• Custom Image for Order Summary• Color of the Pay Now Button• Text color of the Pay Now Button• Section Background Colors• Color of the byline


A/B Testing• Allows us to verify and test different designs

against one another.

• Via Google Website Optimizer and the GWO plugin.

• Validates that changes we have made do not significantly affect conversion.


Adding new A/B Tests• Create Variations.

• Define experiments.

• Insert <gwo:includes/> tags in code.

• Insert <gwo:conversion/> tag in code.

• Run Experiment.


Goals At this Stage

• Make changes without breaking the site.

• No longer just ‘make it work’, need to make it really nice.

• Adapt to rapidly changing business needs.

• Scaling up development.


How do you build up a team around Grails?


• Grails Programmers are hard to find

• But we can always find Java developers

• Builds on industry-leading frameworks. Spring / Hibernate. Those developers are available.

• Attitude / fit

Identifying the right people to work with


• Put together job specs as a team

• Blogging / social networks / twitter

• Conferences and User Group Meetings

• Letting our work get out there.

• Recruiters are expensive and bad. DIY.

Making it attractive


Silicon Milk Roundabout


Other places

• http://www.grailsjobs.com

• London Groovy Grails User Group

• Reddit

• Here!


http://www.grailsjobs.com

http://www.grailsjobs.com

How we work?• Pair Programming

• Daily Standups

• Retrospruktions

• Team Activities ( Lunches, conferences )

• No a lot of hierarchy.

• Features in pairs are more robust

• Hack Days fortnightly ( every 2 weeks )


Communication• Across different teams

• Pivotal Tracker / Trello

• Validation of features

• Team Lunches with a friend


Communication

• Within the team

• Stand ups

• Retrospectives

• Document via tests

• Common Environments


Code Quality• Writing more tests. Commitment to write unit /

integration / functional tests.

• Boy Scout Rule

• Shared Ownership

• TDD using Geb and Spock.

• Jenkins to make sure it works on the other machine.

• CodeNarc to enforce best practices.


Increase in Unit Tests over time


Increase in Integration Tests over time


Useful Stuff• Git Flow

• Continous Integration Game for Jenkins

• Less

• Start / Stop / Continue / Less / More

• Pairing with Designers


Is Grails right for my startup?

• Penetration test by the Telegraph showed us value of best practices.

• Can build things quicker. Make us more responsive.

• “At Last Minute this would have taken 6 months”

• Awesome Community.


Challenges• Speed running Functional test and Integration tests.

• Finding the right people.

• Cost of Idea licenses.

• Deployment.

• Services are US-based. Difficult in the UK.

• Failed Amazon Beanstalk Experiment.


The Future• £5 Million Marketing initiative

• Mobile

• More integrations

• Grails 2.0

• ?


Questions?


come work with us

http://www.secretescapes.com/jobs




A year in the life of a Grails startup

Technology

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