Here’s a great post about the guys at Carsonified that built a web app in four days(!). They have great tips for developers of any kind. Here’s the bits that I really liked …personally I’d love to try to adopt the tips in one way or another when the time comes.
[...] Limit meetings to one 10 minute chat in the morning and one 10 minute wrap-up at the end of each day. Meetings are the best way to kill productivity and crush creativity so keep ‘em short.
[...] Get people away from their machines at lunch. Go for lunch together and maybe throw the frisbee or play Wii. The excitement and creativity will quickly deteriorate if you don’t have a break during the day.
[...] Coordinate how your designers and developers are going to work together. Our designer creates static HTML and then passes it to the developers who use the HTML as a basis for creating templates. These templates are then committed to a Git repository and from then on, the whole team works from that one repository.
[...] It’s not enough to just have a designer and a developer. You need a dedicated person who’s focus is solely spreading the word about your application and working to get media coverage. There’s no way we could get the kind of coverage for Matt that we hope to achieve without several of us working full time on it. However, do not hire a PR agency for this – there needs to be an authentic passion for the app that can only come from your team. (For instance, I asked TechCrunch to cover it, and Erick came back with the suggestion to write this post).
[...] Printers, chalk boards and meeting space. People need the physical space to throw around ideas. We’ve painted an entire wall with blackboard paint
so the team has room to sketch ideas
I seriously though about painting my room’s back wall with blackboard paint. Until I realized I’m renting.
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Related to the last subject: One option is to make an ordinary meeting room wall as a continually fulfilling painting/writing base like we have at Apaja. http://www.flickr.com/photos/asmunder/2158297464/ – nowadays that wall is much more covered with drawings, poems, guestbook entries from visitors and other stuff.
Great idea! What material you guys are using? …the next step would be to get your Flickr feed to show on the other wall. Photos from family and friends showing in your home and the feeds from employees’ Flickr streams showing on your meeting room, or even better office lobby for the potential customers to gaze at. And to make the picture perfect you would of course allow your best customers to add their streams to your walls and give your streams to them, thus giving people insight of what happens at their partner’s business.
Robert and James are doing something towards this at Amsterdam > http://roomwareproject.org/