Author Archives: Highwayman - Page 2

RailsBridge: Open Source, Open Community

Posted by on February 1, 2011 No comments

RailsBridge December 2010 Workshop

One exciting open source project that I am participating in this year is RailsBridge, which provides free Ruby on Rails workshops.

The concept is teaching web development to non-programmers and making coding an approachable skill, rather than something abstract and highly technical.

RailsBridge has taught the workshop to over 500 people and looking to add on several hundred more this year with its announcement of 8 workshops in 2011 (more may be added as more organizers step up).

Basic structure of the workshop is an installation portion on Friday night and development day on Saturday. By the end of Saturday, all participants will have installed, developed and deployed a Ruby on Rails application onto the Internet.

The workshop provides the instruction but more importantly, the community and support that make programming a sustainable activity. The goal is to introduce both web development as a skill and community. Even developers need mentors to guide them along the path to coding mastery (if there is such a thing).

Sounds zen, but I have been reading Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye, which advocates the same message of mentoring and community.

RailsBridge is a non-profit, so donations, volunteers and sponsors are all welcome.

BuildBinder Pitch @Lean Start-up Machine

Posted by on February 1, 2011 No comments

Say it in 140 or less

Posted by on January 26, 2011 No comments

Say what you will about Twitter, but I love it. It makes you say it in 140 characters. No more, no less.

Even private messages. No lengthy emails that ramble on. and on. and on. Say it and get on with it.

Best thing about a 140-character universe is that it forces creativity. Do more with less. Make shorter statements. Express more in fewer words.

I got a similar message from the book Rework by 37Signals in the chapter ‘Hire the Better Writer’. Basically, writing = communication = marketing. And everything about a company should be about marketing.

This message is already heard in the design community. Many websites are gravitating towards cleaner layouts. Apple products say more with the features that they do not include than with the ones that they do.

This post was inspired while using Pivotal Tracker today. The story boxes are small, and the comment boxes even smaller. This physically forces shorter messages, which reminded me of Twitter… and you know the rest.

Finally, Tim Young of Socialcast and about.me explains how he got VC funding for two start-ups using the same 5 slide deck.

Lean Start-up Machine SF

Posted by on January 23, 2011 No comments

Lean Start-up Machine SF

The Lean Start-up Methodology started by Eric Ries has been gaining buzz here in San Francisco, so I decided to attend their workshop, The Lean Start-up Machine (LSM), this past weekend hosted at Twilio.

Introductory talks from Eric Ries and Dave McClure caught my attention, and all teams formed groups around 10 pitches ranked by popularity by all attendees.

Coincidentally, an architecture firm had flow in from Chihuahua, Mexico to participate in the workshop. They were part of the Tech Business Accelerator based in San Jose. Finding much common ground, we decided to join forces and tackle the problem of finding reputable contractors for projects.

On Saturday, we developed a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for user testing. I wrote up a summary of our LinkedIn survey strategy on Quora.

On Sunday, we began developing our application for presentations to the lean start-up competition judges.

Although we did not win the competition, we came away with a fully functional application and excellent product concept moving ahead. Many lessons learned, and here are the highlights:

Automate whenever possible: LSM gave us excellent tools such as Unbounce and KISSmetrics for setting up and analyzing landing pages to our applications.

Iterate quickly: Two days to get a working MVP leaves no time for deliberation, so our group quickly iterated quickly on our limited dataset.

Get the demo working, then leave it alone: I coded up the demo two hours before and did not touch it and made a back-up copy on my machine locally.

Finally, big thanks to the team from NK and TechBA! Good working with you guys and look forward to the possibilities ahead!

Statustar Website

Posted by on September 20, 2010 No comments

Statustar now has a website, and you can visit it here.

Statustar Chrome Browser Plug-in

Posted by on September 20, 2010 No comments

Statustar now has a Google Chrome browser plug-in, and you can see it here.

See the Google presentation explaining what the plug-in is about here.

Statustar Facebook App

Posted by on September 20, 2010 No comments

Statustar launched at Startup Weekend in May 2010 as a Facebook app, and you can see it here.

Statustar Launch at Startup Weekend

Posted by on May 6, 2010 No comments

Statustar is a global status notifier that helps you update anywhere, status everywhere. Our goal is to make it like Gravatar, but for status updates using red, yellow and green to indicate availability.

We launched the application at Startup Weekend in May 2010, see the details here on our Facebook page.

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