J-Fall 2018: Hiltsje Smilde – How to use experimentation in the back-end to build the best applications
What do Facebook, Spotify and Netflix have in common? They all have great technology that enables them to run experiments on real users. The best companies in the world all use experimentation to make their products better. Jeff Bezos even says that Amazon’s success is directly tied to the number of experiments they do every day. Experimentation is often referred to as A/B testing, and if you heard about that, you probably think that’s just a front-end thing. You will learn the difference between running experiments in your front-end and back-end. And see how experimenting in your back-end opens up a lot more possibilities in for example testing new features. We will look together at great examples of server-side testing, how to apply experimentation in your application and how the results of these experiments help you to build the best product.
Hiltsje Smilde is a Solutions Architect at Optimizely, where she helps companies using technology to put an end to digital guesswork and making business decisions based on data. As Solutions Architect she advises customers on the implementation of Optimizely’s technology in both front-end and back-end and helps them setting up their experimentation program according to best practices. Hiltsje has a background in both software development and research and loves combining those two in her current field of work.
