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First Blitzweekend session, personal notes (8)

October 8th, 2007 · by Heri · Blitzweekend, entrepreneurship

This weekend, I did with Mehdi a blitzweekend session, the first of its kind. The goal was to make a product in 2 days, from concept idea, design, development to deployment. This is a real challenge in itself, something that is possible now thanks to technologies like ruby on rails.

We began Saturday 8.30 am, each having our own web application idea. I wanted to build a game, and his idea was to make something like crunchbase for Montreal.

If we fast forward to Sunday evening, I can say this was both an intense and memorable experience. Time constraints is a huge challenge, and forces you to execute, both in good and bad ways. Here are my notes, some of them are subjective, some are not that important, but we are writing them all for the next session, in hopes to make it better:

  • it’s essential to write specs and sort them by priority. I had features of the application grouped into batches, from required to nice-to-haves. Looking at it again, half of the planned features were developed.
  • this is obvious but one needs to be deconnected from RSS, twitter, email etc. This was super easy. No family/friends either. Somehow this was arranged. There were a couple of things I couldn’t have not gone to, but this is by far the most productive and intense days I experienced in months. I estimate I spent about 15 full hours during the two days for the exercise.
  • There is no time left to look up for documentation, tutorials, reference docs etc. You just have to know your tools. If you don’t, it’s best to implement a feature with something you already master
  • Time flies. Knowing that you have to deliver in a few hours shuts down the whole world and inputs. Before you know it, 4 hours have passed.
  • I had another look at the code this morning. All I can say is that it’s not the most elegant code you will find out there, but hey it works. I also had a look at the results, and I can’t believe I took 2 days to do it. I guess I lost time in design concepts and design.
  • coffee is a great beverage!

Mehdi finished his crunchbase application. The result for me is at startupweb20.com; the game was planned at the beginning to be a parody with what’s happenning in the “web2.0″ world. You can sign up and launch a startup*, and try to win millions before the whole ecosystem crashes. This was deployed at 9.30pm, which is 37 hours after we began. Not sure now what I am going to do with it, I guess it will scraped for the next blitzweekend session.

* note: the usual path is signup, create a new startup, hire 3 people for your startup, then develop a feature.

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