Fear, Love, Inspiration and Everything In Between
Developing a technology product is really a tedious and risky business when all is said and done. It seems that with the advent of this Web 2.0 era, the pressure is even greater that if you don’t do it yesterday, it’s already done by someone else.
This is a pressure we’ve been experiencing to say the least - especially considering we’re building things I’ve had floating in my head for something like 2 years. To that end, we’ve been working as effectively as possible. I’ve managed much larger teams previously, but this time it’s a little different - it’s fun and exciting all the time. Every day’s got a new gem (no pun intended).
I’ll be introducing the team formally later, but Demetrius Nunes, on of my secret weapons, sent me a link to a blog entry he wrote. It was really nice to see and hear how much someone working with me/us felt:
For instance, I am working in a Rails project right now where the whole team, including the client himself, is made of those kinds of people. I know it's unusual to work with a client with deep technical knowledge, but I got lucky this time. He chose Rails over more established options such as ColdFusion (which he personally masters) and this alpha-geek attitude reflects on other areas of his personality as well, such as having flexible work hours, using web-based collaboration tools and even doing podcasts.I was truly delighted to hear from him such motivating phrases as “If we build anything that might be useful to other people, let’s give it back to the community” or “Sure, I’d be glad if you blogged about the project” or simply “I completely trust your judgment on that”.
Yes, my client encourages me to blog and to do open-source development. I wonder what my odds would be of having the same thing if I was working on a .NET “enterprise” project for a big company. Don’t laugh please. :-)
Are you inspiring your team? Are they inspiring you? It makes all the difference.