Sprint Rant. It's the future
I'm scrambling to finish my deliverables for tomorrow because I've been getting distracted by other things. Plus I hit one of those really stupid rough spots in the app that doesn't deserve to be so rough (an effort for value thing).

But I did something really cool this week. On Tuesday I sprinted with friends on a commercial project (so it was technically a contract job, I got paid and everything) and we got a TON done in a single day. It was an add-on to their existing product TypeRoom, which is interesting because it was as fun as a new project. (I just realized one under-appreciated advantage to a distributed architecture is that making additions to the system becomes nearly as fun as a new standalone project. That has tremendous value!)

This sprinting thing needs to be thought about more in many different places. Sure there have been open source project sprints (Mash Pit is about this idea), and sometimes companies will do internal sprints. But the neat thing about this was that it involved an outsider for an internal commercial project. Contract sprinters! It's weird because it felt very jam session like. How often is there collaboration across startups at the individual level in the form of sprints for commercial stuff?

Sprints are fun. When you're working on a new project and you execute it right, it's just so amazing to see some great value come out in such short time. And all the pieces come together before your eyes, like when you're working on a large project over a long period of time and you slowly see it all come together, sometimes so slow you don't even realize it. Here's it's very obvious and seems to feedback into the productivity that makes things happen so quickly.

So we need to see how we can make sprints happen more often. Not only was it fun, we built something cool, gained a lot of experience, but we got paid! All in a day. And then it's over. (Well, there's a followup session scheduled for next week, but then I'm probably out of it).

I've been thinking about this for a while and how to get the most of out these. A while back I was even thinking of it as a new model for startups in a way. It's like a distributed incubator model with rapid application development/deployment.

Imagine a small group of people getting together to build something for a day. All the infrastructure is there, version control, wiki, ticketing, but even a deploy system and production server. Healthy snacks and drinks. Everybody prepped with a good night sleep. Set some goals, cut things, cut things, and GO. Then deploy. Then you're done.

Do this every week with different people and you get really good at it. If you're launching products, everybody can take an optional amount of stake, but should have the option to just walk away. If it takes off, those that are willing to come back and support it can and will obviously get bigger stake. You're doing it every week and you get paid for it (optional!), but it could also be an investment. Do this a lot with the right people and you can't help but land a winner now and then.

Anyway, I could go on, but I'll leave you with this guy because he's really really awesome: