Startup Weekend DC has come and gone – in 54 hours we envisioned, designed, developed, and deployed HolaNeightbor. We had a large development team full of talented programmers, and I had a great time working with them all. I’ve had some time to think about the experience – what went right, what went wrong, and what I’d do differently. So, without further adieu, here are my:

Suggestions for future Startup Weekend development teams

• Send instructions out to all developers prior to the weekend on how to properly install any required software – in our case, subversion and Ruby on Rails.

• Find a production server before the weekend starts, make sure you have someone experienced in deployment, and deploy to a test environment as early as possible.

• Have an design integration team. This team would work with the design group to create XHTML/CSS mockups, and then with the development team to incorporate the designs.

• If possible, decide on a limited set of CSS selectors early on that developers can use while creating their views, and the designers can then use to apply formatting.

• Don’t get too caught up in “the right way to do it” – there is plenty of time AFTER the weekend to refactor code. We made an early decision to develop using REST, which backfired a bit, since not everyone was up to speed on RESTful routes.

• If you have a large group of developers, pair-program. There are only so many chunks you can break a project into, so assigning a two-person team to a task makes a lot of sense. Also, errors tend to accumulate in conjunction with lack of sleep – an extra set of eyes can avoid typos and other silly mistakes.

• Use plugins, but only if someone has used them before. Why re-invent the wheel? – a lot of functionality is out there, free for the taking. If you do use a plugin, however, make sure you have someone who has used it before and can configure it correctly. A lot of extra time can be spent trying to make a plugin work if you don’t know what you’re doing.

• Do the simplest thing possible first. Get your basic functionality in place first, THEN shoot for the moon.

• Take a break. Make sure you get up every hour or so for a few minutes. Every few hours take a 15 minute break. Be sure to stretch – especially your shoulders.

• Get some sleep. We didn’t work past 1:00am any of the nights, and I think that worked well for us. If you do decide to go the crazy route of little sleep, try drinking an energy drink followed immediately by a 20-minute nap – that’s just enough time to freshen you up while not making you groggy.

• Enjoy yourself! StartupWeekend is fun – you’re spending the weekend with a bunch of other sharp developers, hacking together a cool product. Though starting up a company is neat, half of the coolness of the a Startup Weekend is the people you meet.