Building Webapps in Europe: Economy, Methodology, and Tips

by Nicolas Paton

Europe today

smaller markets
internet access in millions
1/3 americans were buying on internet in 2003
language issues are good for us
legislation differences
taxes differences
invoicing/accounting differences
we can do what has been done in other languages

Ideas are worthless

an idea by yourself doesn't mean much
Great execution makes the difference
    this is what distinguishes great ideas from great works

avoid RHP

programming in Rails if it was pHP (hehehe)
terrible to maintain

Focus on QUALITY

bring to the market a product of great Quality
going to ruby on rails is a movement towards quality

First-time: test-drive

don't do a full blowed apps
start small
something you can start sell right way
incremental
don't go into webapps if you don't have a certain amount of experience in client work.

Financing

auto-financing
    client work!
search for investors
the old FFF rule: friends, family and fools

Marketing

know your market
partnership
don't count only on
    the web buzz!
    your company website to give you business

Hire a business man!

maybe not hire, but have someone taking care of business
going between tasks from dev/bus takes you a lot of time
frees you to concentrate on development

Design about words

design is deciding what goes in and out of your work
explain your design before you code

Planning

planning as if it was client work
its so easy to go into useless features
reduce your COOL stuff... do it wisely!

scale your planning
    first version
        1-2(3) months
    use-cases
    doesn't seem like agile, but it is!
        you HAVE to take a few days for planning
    1-2 week iteration

reduce
    go back to your planning and take stuff out!

Interface design

separate design from implementation
you probably aren't a graphical designer (at least not a brilliant one)
find someone around you, hire, partnership, etc..
web design requirements:
    must be an HTML obsessional!
    be among the JS KungFu Masters Association
    must be a CSS god!
    defensive web designer
    know your ways in layout
    web typographic
    interaction
    color
    know what's proper accessibility!

The last 5%

those buggy features that you don't want to go into...

Release

release fast
release often
or...
choose what's good for you
    dependent of your constraints
    dependent of your app cycles

Conclusion

business
    in building webapps is much more than 50% of work
less server-side code
    more design