Peter Philips of Freelancer.com shares about Freelancer.com Engineering Culture. The WebGeek DevCup last August 25, 2012 was a huge success! Over 200 developers and attendees treaded the path towards the Meralco Multi-Purpose Hall, Meralco Compound in Ortigas Center for the WebGeek DevCup.

1. The
Next
Big
Thing
Peter Phillips
Director of Engineering You are here
Freelancer.com
email: peter@freelancer.com
twitter: @freelancer

2. It’s 2012.
World Population
6,970,000,000
Number on the Internet
2,080,000,000 (30.0%)
Source: Internet World Stats & United Nation

3. The other
70%
of the world’s
population are
about to join
the Internet.

4. Worldwide Internet Penetration 2011
North America Europe
266 million users 475 million users
77.4% penetration 58.4% penetration
Asia
825m (of 3834m)
21.5% penetration
Africa
110m (of 1014m)
Latin America 10.9% penetration
204m (of 592)
34.5% penetration

5. One of the first things they
are doing is looking to
raise their economic
status.

6. And it’s never been easier
to learn a trade.

9. Free Stanford
Course in AI.
Over 170,000
enrolled, 8x the
total number of
students at
Stanford.

10. We are the global labor exchange
We connect businesses with skilled
freelancers. Globally.

11. Mathematical
modelling for
chemical engineering
US $251 13 Bids

12. Who is bidding?
Pakistan UK degree, 2yr exp.
Germany Uni student
India Indian company
Bangladesh Chemical engineer

13. Freelancer.com
Freelancer Globally
➔ Started in 2004
➔ World’s largest outsourcing marketplace
➔ ~ 4,100,000 users from >234 countries/regions
➔ ~ 2,400,000 posted projects to date
➔ ~ $610,000,000 through site to date
➔ In top 300 websites globally (Alexa)

14. Freelancer.com is huge
in the developing
world.
Now ranks 21st in
Bangladesh
(155m population)
Below:
Amazon.com
Apple.com
MSN.com
Bing.com
BBC
Etc..

15. Freelancer technology stack

16. Cloud Computing – Amazon Web Services
EC2 S3
Elastic Compute Cloud Simple Storage Service
EBS
CloudFront
Elastic Block Store
IAM
Identity and Access Management

17. A few tech statistics
➔ Between 10-15k users on-site at any time
➔ > 90 instances (c1.xlarge, m1.xlarge, m2.2xlarge)
(high cpu, high memory)
➔ > 15TB of EBS storage
➔ > 450GB of S3 storage (in 20-40KB files!)
➔ Our databases serve:
 > 310M requests per day
 > 678G of returned results traffic per day
➔ Our web hosts serve > 29M HTTP requests per
day

18. Development
➔ EBS snapshots for working with current,
production scale data
➔ Spin up new instances / services on-
demand
➔ Shadow instances for burning in builds

19. Measure, measure, and measure again
➔ Measure every change
➔ Track every metric you can
➔ Split test as much as possible
➔ Close the feedback loop
➔ Catch things early

20. Continuous refinement / improvement
➔ Lots of small course corrections
➔ .. Then you don’t need as many big ones!
WTF?! $#@ change it all ! Let’s just use the spec as is ..
Wait, not that either..
“Under new management”
Performance improvements
Strip unnecessary features
Usability refactoring
Additional requirements

21. Testing – Continuous Integration
If it doesn’t build
… don’t ship it
… if it breaks FIX IT !
➔ Buildbot
➔ Jenkins
➔ Pulse

22. Deployment
➔ fabric
➔ Capistrano
➔ Percona Toolkit
➔ Facebook’s gatekeeper
We deploy, on average,
at least 4-5 times a day

23. Creativity matters
(Q1 2012 Hackathon)

24. … but not as much as code
(Q4 2011 Hackathon)

25. There’s never been a better
time to start a company…
… or join ours!

26. We’re Hiring in Sydney and Makati!
➔ Product Managers
➔ Testing Engineers
➔ UI / UX designers
➔ Software Engineering
 Web Development
 Systems Architecture
www.freelancer.ph
peter@freelancer.com