Building of Basecamp Workshop

I just arrived from the “Building of Basecamp” Workshop, and I should probably write something down about it, but time is short so I’ll just keep for the immediate thoughts, and based on a super document made during the workshop, I’ll talk more in detail later on.

I really liked the workshop in general, there wasn’t that much new to me unfortunately, but at least I got to do a checkpoint on some ideas I already had and of course hearing some stuff on the first person is always great, and on this matter Jason, David and Ryan did it really well. The workshop covered several topics of the process of designing, creating and deploying the Basecamp Project Manager web application, so it was like a day to get to know the thing from it’s very first steps all the way to becoming what it is today. The topics the workshop covered were:

• Introduction
• The small picture
• How did we start
• From ideas to features
• From features to screens
• From screens to programming
• From programming to user testing
• On to promotion and launch
• But launch is just the beginning
• Moral support
• Our mistakes

but about them I talk later in detail, for now it’s all the time I have!

Add comment June 9th, 2005

Building of Basecamp and SubEthaEdit

I’ve just attended the “Building of Basecamp” workshop, by 37signals, and after writing about it, I had to write about SubEthaEdit, specially the results of having 5 guys with a mac with this little program.

Just the day before Melo had been talking to me, that it would be a nice idea to use SubEthaEdit to take notes together (this little application allows people to edit simultaneous, in a real-time environment, one same document, writing down you made which changes, read more about it on it’s site here).

When we got the conference we were just about to start when we realized that a guy, named Nathanael Obermayer already had the same idea, so we just joined his shared document! Super! Me, André and Melo started taking down notes all-together. By the time the coffee-break happened Magnus Rembold joined us, making us a team of five taking down notes about the workshop. It was a memorable experience, with an incredible result: a 1300 lines document with all the notes you can imagine about this workshop. One incredible thing was that when the guys put up a new slide, it would take more than a couple of seconds to have it all.

Just to get an idea about what I’m talking about, the final result are a bunch of lines that looks like this:

the colors show who wrote it, so as you can see this simple paragraph was written for 3 different persons, each completing eachother.

We just agreed no to share the document, since it’s so rich about what happened there, it wouldn’t be correct for the guys at 37signals. Never the less, it was an incredibly experience in collaborative working, and I looking forward to see it working during Reboot.

1 comment June 9th, 2005