Montreal Tech Watch

GoalR project at Blitzweekend
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Can you present yourself? What is your background?

Ian Rae – background in web performance optimization and underlying network infrastructure including architecture and operations. I’m the founder of Syntenic, a consulting and managed services company and I blog at infreemation.net

Will Stevens – is a PHP and CSS whiz, works as a LAMP coder at Syntenic, and insanely good foosball player – follow him on

www.swilled.net

Can you describe what is the GoalR project? How did you get the idea? What problem does it aim to solve?

Ian Rae: I was reading a magazine article several years ago about Google’s management practices. What stuck in my head was a sort of self-management software that prompted you Monday AM to set your objectives for the week, and then would follow up at the end of the week so that you could report your successes and …well… misses. I really liked the concept of what I’ve been calling “virtuous feedback loops” where the software is designed around both human nature and our habits to help acheive our goals.

What were your objectives regarding Blitzweekend? What did you expect from the event?

Ian Rae: Primarily I was there to see what was happening in Montreal, support the community, and as an excuse to try the 37Signals “Getting Real” approach. Will has wanted to dig into Ruby on Rails and this was a great excuse for a first project. So we both had personal motives to do some work over the weekend.

Can you talk us about your experience of Blitzweekend? any challenges? How did you overcome problems?

Ian Rae: It was great, but Will did most of the work so deserves the props, especially given that it was his roommate’s 30th birthday party on Saturday night! The concept and basic ideas didn’t take much time to come up with and the ideas flowed fast and furious. The main objective I had was to protect Will from non core or “epicentric” features that were not necessary or sufficient to solve the fundamental problem: allowing me to score my ability to set a goal and delivery the goods, realistically and predictably. Mainly my role was to remove obstacles from Will’s path as he hacked and slashed his way towards a functional web application.

What is now your objective for the project? Any plans to continue the work?

We have had some great feedback from lots of folks from different backgrounds (primarily non-tech) that they like the approach where the software prompts you to interact on a regular basis and that there is a feedback mechanism (your goal completion or “accuracy”) to improve upon.

We would like to polish it off and launch it as a free beta, and find time to develop the small teams oriented functionality that would allow it to be a sort of peer-to-peer management tool. We’ll keep you posted on our progress!!