Startup Weekend Atlanta

I have writer’s block.  I need Skribit.  Except that I’m blogging about the process of creating it.  When it’s created, I won’t need it anymore.  My job will be done.

We divided up into two groups for lunch:  Ray’s Pizza and Tin Drum.  Many people went offsite, which was good for productivity, and bad for productivity.  Good because a lot of people were ready for a break and needed fresh air.  Bad because it’s hard to get going again.

Sometimes you need a “laugh your ass off” break.  And when it’s geek humor, even better.

Internet Commenter Business Meeting 

Commenter Business Meeting 2

Pone!

Dev Team: 

Jason:  BaseCamp demo of Home page;  live demo of login for readers and bloggers

Jeff:  Demo of the Widget:  What’s Hop’n?    Lots of clapping afterwards — looks pretty amazing so far.

QA Team:  (newly formed after the last meeting):

Josh:  we plan to test:  all the platforms and screen resolutions, blog platforms

How to submit a bug report; we’ve set up a ticket management system.  There will be private (for the hard-core types here) and public interface (for more casual use).  Private will use Trac; public will use the public interface

Can submit to bugs @ Skribit.com.  Anyone can “hop in there”  (unintended, but decent pun).

…or what comes before alpha?

No Startup Weekend has had people using the product (admittedly, I’m using the terms very loosely) by Sunday morning. The ones that have launched during the weekend, have launched a few minutes before midnight.

But apparently enough people read Paul’s blog that we’ve had an accidental launch.  It had to be taken down, of course — too many bugs still exist.  Just think of it as a super-private pre-alpha.  (Is that an omega?)  But it’s very cool to have a product in use even before it really exists.  Bodes well for future demand, we hope.

is too early? For the beer and wine, that is.

Some are already asking, wondering if it will impair productivity (but perhaps not caring all that much). Others are still recovering from last night’s consumption (which apparently went on until a very late hour.)

But there are chilled alcoholic beverages available, thanks to a timely run last night before the midnight hour. And I have the feeling that now that it’s noon, some people will stop worrying about whether it’s too early.

Calvin:  Putting final touches on “forgot password,” everything for blogger admin is in beta stage.  Should be all done in half an hour.

Rob:  We can vote.  That’s progress.  Double voting — needs 15 minutes.  “Tag cloud” is going to be a “pond-wide” search — in 30-45 minutes.

Jeff:  widget style is done, now doing an article list;  rest in about another 60-90 list.

Eric:  working with Jason and Justin on styling.  Cut up the images, do it as HTML, test on browsers, then move to RHTML.

Jason and Alan remind everyone:  Alpha testing after 12:30 company-wide meeting by QA guys.  Prep for a quick demo at the meeting, then move to an early alpha.

Dev is rollin, rollin, rollin.

One of the biggest challenges — among many — at Startup Weekend, is building strong teams from scratch.  When each team is all working on the same page, and there are fruitful interactions between teams, it’s a beautiful thing.  When all four teams are trying to do the same thing, it’s not pretty, and leads to a lot of lost time and productivity (and isn’t so great for morale either.)

Admittedly, there’s a lot of overlap between the groups, and there’s also a lot of overlap between the talents everyone brings.   But the quicker each team, and each individual on that team, has a specific and well-defined role, the better.  It’s happening here now, so now everyone is trying to let go of the instances where it didn’t happen (and they are legion.)  There’s too much left to do to hang on to any frustration.

…a little love,” says Josh. The love is mostly starting to flow here. People have found their teams, the teams are functioning, problems are getting solved.

Amazing things will be happening by noon, it seems. Things that look like a for-real product.

Laura says, “how can it be 10:00 already? I just woke up.” But 10:00 it is — the first 7-minute meeting of the day.

Development (Jason): We’re planning a noon alpha release; 95% of the way there. We have users already: Paul blogged about it, and even without a link, 3 people actually signed up. The signup wasn’t completely working, so we had to take it back down. People started appearing in the database, when some of us didn’t even know it was up.

Even basic HTML experience would be handy to help us get some pages up. We’re setting up a BaseCamp page for bug reporting.

Product Dev/UX: (Alan) Here’s the process for today: we’re trying to keep the developers isolated so that they can crank.

We’ve set up 4 sections: home page (public interface); blogger admin; widget function; reader admin (where people can see results of votes). We have a product/project manager for each one: Michael: home page; Alan (blogger and reader admin); Jeff Heaney (widget); everyone needs to route everything through these guys.

We need a QA person: couple of people jump in to do that for 12:00 meeting.

Creative Team: becomes a team of 1 at 3:00, when everyone else goes back to North Carolina. So everything needs to be done by then, obviously. Design is in base camp as PSD.

Marketing: We will have copy in the next couple of hours.  We’re working on the press release — nobody else keep working on it.