Book of the Week: Getting Real

08 Nov 2015

Scott Cook, one of the cofounders of Intuit, recommended Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application by Jason Fried, during his talk at Stanford. I previously read Rework by Jason Fried. If you wanted a different way of building a web application instead of raising tons of VC money and burning it in Silicon Valley, read this. The book was a quick read, because it condensed all the relevant points. Here are a few sections from the book. Start With No It is important to do one thing well than trying to everything poorly. A fork and a spoon is much better than a spork. How often to see sporks in places other than school cafeteria? In order to do the core things well, you need to say no to feature requests. Hidden Costs If a request makes it past you saying no, you need identify all the hidden costs associated with said request. Then you can say no again. Forget Feature Requests If something is important enough, your customers will bring it up again. No need to track and remember stuff. This is why it is important to get users early on. It is impossible to respond to every feature request. From Idea to Implementation

Code is the costliest, time intensive, most difficult to change part of bringing an idea to life. It should be the last thing you do. Avoid Preferences

Preferences are a way to avoid making tough decisions

This one hit a chord. This is like governments putting every damn thing up to a vote. I don’t want to vote on 100 propositions. People are elected into office to make decisions, so they should make them. Alone Time Developers need alone time in order to be productive. Getting interrupted kills the flow enough that it takes a while to get back into it. You want long uninterrupted stretches of time to be productive. This is in contrast to manager who have to deal with lots of small insignificant tasks to keep the lights on. You Can’t Fake Enthusiasm

Go for happy and average over frustrated and great.

Picking people who will be happy at your company leads to a better work environment. It also helps as coming off as enthusiastic during your interviews since it can be contagious like a disease. Use Real Words Instead of using lorem ipsum as placeholder, you should use real words. I am guilty of this. Using lorem ipsum keeps you from thinking about the interface and what is there. The contents of the box are important. Real data and how people will interact with that data is important to consider early in the design. Having placeholders keeps you from making all design decisions that need to made. Start Your Engines

Everyone can read a book. Everyone can come up with an idea. Everyone has a cousin who’s a web designer. Everyone can write a blog. Everyone can hire someone to hack together some code. The difference between you and everyone else will be how well you execute. Success is all about great execution.

The central theme of the book is to do less and execute well on the few things that matter. Purchase Getting Real on Amazon.com or download it at 37signals for the cost of your email address.