What’s your name?

At the beginning of the event, everyone had an opportunity to introduce themselves, their business, and state who or what they were looking for. I was surprised at how many people with ventures did not introduce themselves. They jumped right to the idea. The idea is important, but free agents want to know just as much about you as your business. Briefly state your name and a little of your background – it won’t take away from the presentation of your idea, and it will definitely help people to get to know you better.

What’s your idea, again?

This goes beyond finding team members. If you cannot clearly articulate what your business is all about in one minute, you need to practice your pitch. After many pitches, I had to ask myself what problems the team members were trying to solve. Technical people are naturally problem solvers, so they want to know about what pains you’re setting out to remedy.

Great idea. Tell me more about your team

Any idea can sink or swim based on the team’s capability. I want to hear about your executive team and their background. I want to hear about your board of advisors or your board of directors. Who inspires you? Who keeps you accountable? If I’m going to jump in the water with you, I want to know that you’ll help keep us afloat by surrounding yourself with great people.

I lost you at “Revolutionary” or “Web 2.0″

You’re in a room with about fifty other entrepreneurs that are just beginning to conceptualize their idea. Is your idea really that revolutionary? These terms really don’t mean anything to me right now. What market are you going after, and why do you feel your company can be disruptive in that space? What’s the market cap, and how much market share do you project over a 1, 2, and 5 year period? How much revenue are you expecting in these years? At what point do you anticipate becoming profitable? Isn’t the social media hype all about Web 3.0 now?

Technical people like substance, and some like hard numbers. Throwing around hand waving terminology doesn’t instill confidence in your idea or you as a potential cofounder.

It’s a Slow Romance

Perhaps it was because the TechStars application deadline is fast approaching, but founders were a bit eager to get your commitment. So let me get this straight, I just met you and learned about your idea, but you want me to come on board next week?

Joining a startup is not something I want to decide on overnight. Finding team members that you jive well with is a time intensive process, and it shouldn’t be rushed for either party. Have coffee regularly, jump on a few calls, then maybe pursue a short or part-time contractual relationship before everyone commits. You’re going to be spending a lot of time together, so chemistry is vital. Enjoy the courting phase, and pop the question when you know it’s the real thing.

If you’re a designer looking to refine your skills on the web, Jon is excellent at his craft in addition to being a great teacher.

So join in on the event. I’m sure you’ll take some learnings home with you. Registration

I’ve really come to enjoy and look forward to Refresh Boston events. The Microsoft NERD Center is a killer venue, and Patrick Haney (notasausage) does a great job in getting a diverse crowd and stellar speakers.

Of course, Jon did a tremendous job with designing the slides for the presentation

If you attended the talk, please rate and comment on us over at SpeakerRate. We definitely want to continue the learning and discussion around this topic.

We had 5 minutes to get our points across. It was challenging but fun. It was a great event and there were lots of other great talks.

The slides are below.

To place further emphasis on the message – communication is a vital part of every project. We’ve inherited so many projects going wrong just because people aren’t being honest and open with each other. Communicate to educate, define norms, and demonstrate progress. These are not nice to haves in your projects – they’re requirements.

Do you have a project that needs rescuing? Contact us so that we can make your software idea a reality.

I talk about it in depth on this blog – what makes a good Engineering team? After this effort, I would say balance, efficiency, and determination. All the skills of the team really came into play here. The group all went above and beyond to make sure that this release was a huge success. I’d like to thank Thos Niles, our product manager, Jason Wadsworth, our architect, Graham Babbitt, our front end developer, Catherine Headen, our graphic designer, Brian Kaney, our development consultant, Kevin Kardian, our data architect, and James McElhiney, our CTO. Their efforts exceeded all expectations.

We’re currently hiring and we’re always on the lookout for solid developers. Right now, we’re focused on finding a project manager and a release engineer. Take it from me, this is a stellar group to be involved with.

There’s so much learning in how this project went. When things calm down a bit, I’ll be sure to post more about the specific knowledge gained from a development process perspective.

• Jeremy Kemper’s keynote – Rails 2.1 is getting released! Awesome changes to migrations (no more migration number collisions), timezone support, tighter integration with memcache. Coolest of all and something that always bugged me in ActiveRecord – being able to check is an ActiveRecord object was actually modified. The introduction of the changed? method should be very handy.
• Mingle – I love Mingle. I checked out this talk because I wanted to learn how to really use Card trees and aggregate properties (some new features in Mingle 2.0). I ended up finding out some really cool functionality that I didn’t know existed (read: project variables). After every iteration rolls by, I previously had to go in and change all the views to reflect the change in iterations. Now, I can do it in one place with project variables. Rock!

• Advanced Restful Rails – I thought this talk was pretty cool. He addressed a lot of patterns that do not fit in the stereotypical resource generator. I really dug the overall message – there’s really 2 steps to making a good restful architecture. It’s really that simple, and it’s not far off from good Object Oriented design.

  1. Identify your resource
  2. Expose the methods you want to

• Fast, Sexy, and Svelte: Our Kind of Rails Testing – this was a good talk. Mainly impressed with DeepTest – it runs your RSPECS in parallel rather than sequentially. For acceptance testing, the recommended Selenium, but I actually prefer SpiderTest. It’s not so dependent on markup and is done in memory rather than in browser

• Integration Testing With RSpec’s Story Runner – yet another great talk on testing. I’m still not sold on stories as part of the RSpec framework, but I’m at least willing to give it another try after David’s great walkthrough
• The Great Test Framework Dance-Off – Josh gets my talk of the day award. This was a totally unbiased look at three popular frameworks RSpec, Test::Unit, and Thoughtbot’s Shoulda
• The Great Kent Beck – I have to be honest, I didn’t get a lot out of Kent’s talk. It was cool to reminisce about TDD, but I didn’t get inspired. Honestly, Q&A was the best part of the keynote.

• Keynote – Joel Spolsky is pretty entertaining, but I didn’t get a lot of substance out of his talk. He touched upon keeping users happy and what it take to do it. Overall, a humorous way to kick things off.
• Entrepreneurs on Rails – this was really inspiring. Dan Benjamin shared his experiences and some of the pitfalls. It was great to get some insight from someone that’s walked the path I’ve wanted to: start off as a service oriented business and break out into some product based businesses.
• 10 Things I Hate About Web Apps – I honestly wish I attended a different presentation. The end was ok, as the speaker introduced LimeLight – it looks like it could compete with AIR – what I liked is that it runs on JRuby – so anything with a JVM can run it.
• Faster, Better ORM with DataMapper – this was probably the highlight of the day. I really think DataMapper could be a replacement for ActiveRecord in the Rails framework. I’ve played with it when I was looking at merb. Better handling for legacy databases, eager and lazy loading. When version 1.0 comes out in the Summer, I will definitely look at it as a primary Ruby ORM.
• Flexible Scaling – this was a great talk. I’ve been playing with Amazon EC2 (a scalable way to create infrastructure/hosts), but now I’m even more intrigued. What’s interesting is that the speaker is hosting his database cluster off of the cloud
• UI On Rails – Connecting Designers and Developers – I was kind of disappointed with this one. It seemed like it surprised a lot of people to give Designers access to source code, but Kyle seems to handle it without issue.

Overall it’s been a fun day, but man am I exhausted. My favorite session was definitely the one on DataMapper. I’m hoping Rails adds similar ORM options and configuration like Merb.

Second Rotation is still looking for front end developers, so I was initially intrigued. Regardless of our need for front end developers, these communities are really interesting to me. With local usability authorities like Steve Krug (who I met briefly) as members, these communities have a lot of interest and value. If you’re a web developer in the Boston area, I heartily recommend you check these groups out.

It was a lot of fun and it was great to meet some local developers. If you have a project you’d like to hack around with, I highly suggest checking this event out. I want to mess around with some API’s – maybe EBay, Shopping.com, or Amazon. I definitely want to create some kind of Facebook app, so we’ll see who’s interested in that idea.

Do you have an old digital camera, camcorder, GPS Device, Cell Phone, or MP3 Player that’s just collecting dust in your closet? Sell it to us.

Of course, we built the site out using the Ruby On Rails. It uses some cool open source projects like GBarcode and Shipping.

Launching SR.com has been a really fun project for me. It has been a great opportunity to refine not only my programming skillset and architectural ability, but also my XHTML and CSS skills. I think we’ve done a really good job of maximizing our capabilities with the Rails framework, and there’s a lot more in store architecturally.

The office has been buzzing with activity, we’ve picked up a lot of great press (Gizmodo, Yahoo, and CNet’s News.com). Perhaps the most most exciting exposure was Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht (Revision3) digging our site on CNET’s “Best of the Web Feature” (It’s about 34 minutes in)

What do you think of the site? I’d love to hear your feedback and the business would be all the better for it. Would you sell us your old electronics?