Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Web Application

Be a surfer. Watch the ocean. Figure out where the big waves are breaking and adjust accordingly.

Instead of freaking out about these constraints, embrace them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to your advantage.

Make each feature work hard to be implemented. Make each feature prove itself and show that it's a survivor. It's like "Fight Club". You should only consider features if they're willing to stand on the porch for three days waiting to be let in. That's why you start with no. Every feature request that comes in to us — or from us — meets a no. We listen but don't act. The initial response is "not now". If a request for a feature keeps coming back, that's when we know it's time to take a deeper look. Then, and only then, do we start considering the feature for real.

The best designers and the best programmers aren’t the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with Photoshop or their environment of choice, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn’t matter. That’s where the real gains are made.

Your product has a voice — and it's talking to your customers 24 hours a day.

All software has bugs – it’s just a fact of life. You

Don’t worry about design, if you listen to your code a good design will appear...Listen to the technical people. If they are complaining about the difficulty of making changes, then take such complaints seriously and give them time to fix things. -Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks (from Is Design Dead?) If

No one is as smart as all of us. -Seth Godin, author/entrepreneur

You have to revisit anyway The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture. -Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft

Details reveal themselves as you use what you’re building. You’ll see what needs more attention. You’ll feel what’s missing. You’ll know which potholes to pave over because you’ll keep hitting them. That’s when you need to pay attention, not sooner. The

Believe it or not, the bigger problem isn’t scaling, it’s getting to the point where you have to scale. Without the first problem you won’t have the second.

If you can’t fit everything in within the time and budget allotted then don’t expand the time and budget. Instead, pull back the scope. There’s always time to add stuff later – later is eternal, now is fleeting.

Which features you choose to include or omit have a lot to do with less software too. Don’t be afraid to say no to feature requests that are hard to do. Unless they’re absolutely essential, save time/effort/confusion by leaving them out. Slow down too. Don’t take action on an idea for a week and see if it still seems like a great idea after the initial buzz wears off. The extra marinading time will often help your brain come up with an easier solution.

Don’t waste time on problems you don’t have yet Do you really need to worry about scaling to 100,000 customers today if it will take you two years to get there?