Originally presented by Nathan Eliot as an Ignite talk at Devopsdays Austin (April 3, 2012) and again at Agile Austin (June 12, 2012). Ties to Nathan's Infochimps blog post, This is How We Do It: http://blog.infochimps.com/2012/05/18/how-we-do-it/

1. Big Data Made Easy

2. We use a lot of new-tech tools

3. We’ve written a lot of new tech tools
Ironfan Wukong
Chef specialization for Ruby library for Hadoop
Big Data in the cloud
Wonderdog Swineherd
Hadoop interface for Workflow engine for
ElasticSearch Hadoop jobs

4. But it’s not about the technology…
… it’s about the culture

5. Hiring Process
Technical
Team Initial Full
Initial Pass Phone
Interview Contract Employment
Interview

6. Management Structure
 Flat: I regularly talk with C-level folks
 Open: Everyone has well-understood roles
 Fair: Leadership leads, not orders about
 Understanding: Problems are addressed, not
blamed

7. Employee Support
 Fully stocked kitchen
 Daily group lunches
 Employee joy fund and voting
 Company outings, both impromptu and formal
 Some fun and games, too

8. Employee Development
 Employee’s focus is largely self-directed
 Lack of experience is (almost) never a
determining factor
 Common language for problems and frustration
 Make employees awesomely valuable, and
totally uninterested in leaving

9. Technical Culture
 Good ideas can come from anyone
 Fail forward, not roll-back
 Repeatability is your friend
 Automate out of boredom or fear, not efficiency
 Failure from audacity is better than failure from
inaction

10. Infrastructure Choices
 More assumed access for developers
 Small, decoupled, late-binding wherever
possible
 Build anew, rather than repurpose an old
 Actively pull unused code and data from
production

11. Beyond DevOps
 NoOps +1: everyone technically does part of
Ops, it’s just my specialty
 AllOps: product & marketing can help Ops, and
vise versa
 It’s all about removing barriers to being
awesome, everywhere

12. What’s next?
 How do we handle the impedance mismatch
between our model and our clients’ models?
 What do we do as the company grows beyond
the size of the monkeysphere?
 How should we tackle user segmentation and
security as we build our Platform out?

13. Contact Us – We’re Hiring!
855-DATA-FUN
infochimps.com/careers
careers@infochimps.com