Last Thursday, the TipDish group met to pick a leader. There were two candidates for the role of CEO. After a vote, Josh Tabin, was elected as our leader. Now that we have a designated leader, I feel more confident that we will be able to make more progress. We have set some challenging goals for ourselves. There was also some shocking news during the meeting. We found out that Erica O'grady and Kelsey Ruger will not be part of the group going forward. Their participation will be missed.

Over the weekend I participated in Houston Startup Weekend. The goal was to implement an entire web company during ONE weekend. We didn't quite reach our goal, but it was fun trying. I'm not sure if it is actually possible to pull this off, but I do have some ideas on how to improve the odds. 1. Set Up Your Source Control on Friday Night. We decided to use Subversion, but it wasn't working until SUNDAY MORNING. We eventually had to to resort to SVNRepository. 2. Work Around the Clock. You won't make it if everyone treats the weekend like an 8 to 5 (or even an 8 to 10) job. We had UI guys that worked up until 5 in the morning, which helped a lot. Still, we lost 13 hours while people were sleeping. If you had a small midnight to 8 shift, you could probably knock out a lot. And that crew would be able to focus with less people around. 3. Dedicate At Least One Developer to making Prod Deployable. Unfortunately for us, we only had one strong Rails programmer. He had to work on setting up Prod, which means he couldn't work on coding the site. 4. Get the Main Application Template Designs done AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. Don't waste time making them PERFECT. Remember, your templates still have to be converted to HTML. If it is Sunday and your developers don't have coded HTML templates, you're toast. 5. Use Agile Development. If you are doing Rails, I recommend that you use Agile Development. ONE (and only one) of the UI guys should sit along side of the Rails developer as he or she codes the site. 6. Call in Help Early. If you do need to call in help, do it early. You don't want to have to explain the entire application to someone new on Sunday afternoon, as we did. Be honest with yourself. If you need help and you know it on Saturday, CALL IN THE HELP! 7. Don't Waste Time Adding Fancy Features. We all want to add the fancy AJAX features. But save that for NEXT weekend. This weekend you just want to get the basics done. 8. Define the BAM (Bare Ass Minimum) Requirements. In order to make the Sunday deadline you will have to reduce the features a lot. 9. Build Off of an Existing Admin System. Almost all web applications need some type of Admin system. Start with a generic framework that already has all of the login / user set up type of functionality built in. I wish I knew of a generic Rails Admin system, a simple base to build off of. Something like Drupal would have probably worked for our application, but no one on the DEV team had Drupal development experience. 10. Pick ONE Repository to Store All of Your Designs, Documents, Etc. Our group was using Basecamp AND Pbwiki which really got confusing after a while. There should be ONE primary repository with everything. Houston Startup Weekend was a great learning experience. I highly recommend Startup Weekend to ANYONE who wants to be part of a startup!

On Friday night I became part of Houston Startup Weekend. I met the group at the Stag Head bar around 6 PM. I don't have an exact head count, but I think there were around 40 or so people there. The goal for the night was to choose the business idea we would develop over the weekend. Each person spent 2 or 3 minutes covering their idea. I had four ideas to present. At the end of the presentations we attempted to use Vosnap.com (which was the first company created out of Startup Weekend) to choose the winning idea, but the program errored due text size limitations. So, we voted on coasters instead. The voting results weren't even close. The group overwhelming chose Laura Mayes' Social Media Directory for Bloggers idea. After the decision, we spent a few more hours fleshing out the business concept. On Saturday morning I arrived at the Method Agency studio around 7:45. There were already three cars in the parking lot. The User Interface guys spent the entire night working on the wire frames. They were at Denny's until 5 AM! Then they spent a few hours sleeping in their cars. Throughout the weekend I have been part of the Dev team. Our goal is to take the input from the UI guys and the Creative guys and to make a website out of it. We only have 4 or 5 guys on the Dev team. They set us up in a small loft with huge windows. Down below we can see all of the other teams working. The other teams are set up on folding tables which are sitting on a photography studio. This weekend I'm playing the role of database designer, which is not a far stretch for me. I meet with the UI team to figure out which data needs to be captured. On Saturday we decided to use Rails as our framework. We only had ONE Rails developer available on Saturday. I've studied Rails but I don't feel comfortable leading the Rails development. We spent most of the day getting the user login and profile setup code working. We accomplished a lot on Saturday. The group came up with the name the company. The Designers came up with a beautiful front page design. The DEV team coded the template in HTML. The Admin person setup the server, with Ruby and Rails, etc. The Rails developer got most of the login and profile code done. A lot got done that I don't even know about. I'm really proud of the work we have done.