Thoughts for Developers
July 25, 2008 | by Clayton Stobbs
In the spirit of Startup Weekend it seemed like a good idea to get more guest posts going regarding lessons learned, experiences, and tips for future Startup Weekend attendees. With that, we’ll start off with a post from Mike Gray (Code and Management) about things to consider for developers attending Startup Weekend. Feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments and lets get a discussion going about best practices. Post below:
Having just gone through Startup Weekend Columbus last weekend, these were some thoughts I had that might help developers or architects attending future Startup Weekends:
- Bring a laptop, pre-loaded with the development tools you are comfortable using.
- Create a source code repository on a public site in advance (github, bitbucket.org, google code). For EventStart, one of our developers already had a github account.
- Know your tools, use what you know, don’t try to learn over the weekend. If you haven’t used git before, don’t make this the weekend you try to convince people to use it and then try to learn it on the fly. You have more important things to worry about and learn this weekend - i.e. getting a company launched.
- Have a public web server host available. For EventStart, one of our developers already had a slicehost account setup. This was immensely helpful.
- Don’t be religious about your development methodology. Not everyone does pair programming. Not everyone is a Ruby on Rails developer. Not everyone uses emacs or vi or vim or TextMate or Visual Studio 2008. Allow the other developers in the group to work the way they are used to working.
- Divide and conquer. Startup Weekend is very intense. Lots of ideas, lots of tasks. Most people that come to these events are extremely bright. Leverage the strengths of the developers by assigning tasks and responsibilities then let them loose. Go, go, go.
- Remember, the assignment for the weekend is to get something done. This code does not need to live forever, does not need to work for every edge case, does not need to do everything you can possibly imagine. You are building a prototype more than a real, working production scalable solution. Keep that in mind, take shortcuts.
Stay tuned for future posts from a variety of attendees about all sorts of topics and again, comments welcome!
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