Leancamp Report

Leancamp was on the 10th May, and a few Edenites including myself headed up to London to check it out.

Leancamp was an unconference: the content was almost entirely decided by the attendees themselves. The organisers chose a couple of notable speakers to get the ball rolling, but the rest was up to us.

Diving into the spirit of the whole thing, I ran three sessions. A brief report of each follows.

Lessons Learned Bootstrapping a Service Company

Most of the attendees were definitely in the startup arena. To this end, I did a very brief presentation on the accidentally lean startup of Eden Development (how we started the company with no cash and made it up as we went along).

There was a company post-mortem afterwards, mostly centered around how I could have done it quicker and been even leaner. Maybe next time (if there ever is one) I’ll do it better, who knows…

Technical Incubation

We spent half an hour discussing whether the concept of service companies such as Eden incubating startups was a good idea. The idea is that we could accept reduced rates in return for an equity stake.

There was a lot of animated discussion about this: many service professionals in the room were wary of equity work, having had bad experiences in the past. We agreed that in principle the concept could work, if the startup was built around a strong idea and the service company had either a controlling stake or real influence in the direction of the startup.

I’m open to ideas in this direction - ping me if you want to discuss further.

Applying Lean Principles to Coding

Rather dismayed by a lack of technical discussion, we decided to get together and have a bit of a chinwag about lean principles can be applied to coding.

Much was made of continuous improvement ideas (applied through practices like pair programming and code reviews) as well as the concept of minimizing waste (applied through YAGNI and the general allergy to Big Design Up Front).

It was an excellent day, and I’m looking forward to the next one. I enjoyed the many hallway conversations I had and would love to continue them online.

Did you attend? What did you get out of the day?

(Photos by Enrique - see the rest of his photos of Leancamp here)