Gil is the Chief Engineer at Squidoo.  He put up a lens telling the story of how Squidoo went from an idea in Seth’s head to a profitable business and the 14th fastest web site in 2007.  They’ve always had a lean strategy, and early-on that meant hiring Viget.

“To keep our staff as lean as possible, we considered several options, ultimately leading to a partnership with Viget Labs, who helped us build version 1.0 of Squidoo.  Hiring in-house employees vs an outside consulting form can be a difficult choice for any startup. On one hand, hiring employees can be a great (and sometimes inexpensive) way to ensure dedication to your project, but the security of fixed cost development and no long-term employee commitments proved to be the right choice for us.”

It’s great to get an inside perspective on both the good decisions and the mistakes that an online start-up is making.  He touches on the benefits of short iterations and frequent releases:

“We quickly established a habit of 2 week development iterations. On every third week our aim was to lock down a feature list for the next iteration as quickly as possible, reserving the latter part of the week for deploying updates, testing code, and fixing bugs. This approach allowed us to prototype new features and release them into the wild with lightning speed.”

As well as their challenges with spam, which is a problem any site that incorporates user generated content will face at some point.

“Spam is a major problem on the internet, and in an age where reputation is everything, organizations can’t afford not to have an aggressive anti-spam policy … Although we have a number of automated tools designed to block spam before it starts, we also rely on the community to report suspect activity.”

Squidoo has a great team that is a lot of fun to work with.  If you’re a PHP developer, I suggest you contact them about becoming their 5th team member.