NOthingyoumissed

I just got back from the New Orleans Barcamp and I’m going to go ahead and join everyone in singing its praises.  Day 1 was great – full of interesting presentations, introductions and exchanging of ideas.  I even got to present twice, once on Test Driven Development and again later in the evening with Stephen Bohlen’s slide-deck on Domain Driven Design. However, fun as it was, it went roughly how I expected, so I probably would not be blogging about its success alone.

It is the second day that was destined for real magic.  The challenge was simple: “Do something to help with the organization of the leagues of people who donate their time to volunteer for the New Orleans public school district”.  Those familiar with software development in general – and the challenge of herding hungover techies who get in at 10am to start and complete a project by 4pm in particular – will recognize it as simply jaw-dropping.  Especially when “something” is expanded to mean “create a full blown, maintainable, multi-media website to bring together and thank volunteers” – wowee.  And yet I’m proud to announce http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org/ which as of this morning did not exist and now does all those things and more.  Everything you see, including domain name, CMS installation, layout, and much of the content was created in one afternoon by a group of dedicated barcamp attendees.

In a word, everyone there was just astoundingly professional.  How professional?  Well a room full of 15 geeks from different backgrounds and diciplenes spent all of 10 minutes debating language choice and platform.  The conversation was literally:

- So it sounds like  PHP is our lowest common denominator and we’ve got a PHP guru?

- Yup.  So let’s do PHP.

- Ok.  Can we do this in wordpress?

- I think so.  We’ve got a couple guys that are good at wordpress and some more that are familar with it.

- Wordpress it is.

And if that isn’t shocking enough then we did it!  In one fell swoop and in no small part through the leadership of Matthew Tritico and others; requirements were defined, refined, scoped back, matched up with a technology, assigned,  implemented, and integrated in a whirlwind six hour session that I consider among the most productive hours of my life.

Oh and luck.  I’m going to go ahead and say that a lot of luck was also involved.

So take aways:

1. Never underestimate the collective power of an enthusiastic, experienced, and focused group.  The trick is getting all three.
2. Value of someone who’s done it once before is that of ten bright people. Value of someone whose done it twice is that of twenty.
3. Take the time and pick the right tool for the job.  The site was created in wordpress with a variety of plugins, and a healthy dose of google products.  A huge amount of functionality with hardly any code at all!  Microsoft take note – this is RAD developoment done right.  It is possible, but drag-drop and a fancy IDE is no replacement for true knowledge.
4. Finally, equally as important as the availability of the right component is the ability to integrate with the rest of the application.  Do not take this for granted – the excellent ecosystem of wordpress plugins was a major deciding factor for us and cut down considerably on integration time that we did not have.

So again, a spectacular job by all.  A lot of great relationships fostered, a lot of tech talk, and one kick-ass site banged out in an afternoon.  Frankly, given the glacial pace at which I see projects progressing in the enterprise space, I really needed to see this.  I’m not even sure what I think about this yet – was it all luck or did I really learn something interesting?

I think likely the latter.