Getting Real Workshop

Ah, the first post of a new blog. It's almost like being a young child with your whole life ahead of you...

This past Friday Lyle and I made the trip from Rochester, MN to Chicago, IL for the "Getting Real" workshop put on by 37signals.com. The workshop was sold-out at 50 participants and we had to register within 12 hours of it being available to get a spot. At the end of the day, Lyle and I both felt that the workshop was worth the $2,000 investment. There was a nice mixture of coding discussion (for Lyle) and marketing discussion (for me) to keep us both interested. Here are a couple things that I found interesting:

1) 2 PIZZA RULE- Give your development team 2 pizzas for lunch. If there isn't enough pizza to feed them all, fire someone. (they feel a team should be about 3 people max)

2) EMULATE DRUG DEALERS- in marketing your product, let people try it, let people use it, and let people feel it.

3) PHP IS THE DEVIL- they are huge fans of the Ruby on Rails development platform. we'll be researching this more in the next few days, and we'll keep you posted on our thoughts.

All in all, the workshop was a success. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson did a great job facilitating the discussion and keeping on track. They are also the inspiration to us finally starting our own blog which is now several years in the making. Please post your comments so that we are encouraged to keep our thoughts flowing.