Last week in Funambol we completed our work on the last version of the product: v10 is already available on myFUNAMBOL and it introduces lot of new features for media sharing. After the good work, before starting the development for future releases, we did an interesting experiment: the so-called freak coding week.
The concept is simple: everyone could create a team and propose an idea; it had to be something to build on top of our platform, but there wasn’t any limit except one: providing a demo of something working a week later. And finally, today was the day of the demos.
My opinion on the experiment is absolutely very positive; today I have seen really cool ideas, something that just works – even if not perfect, but we just had a week. I believe the success of this coding week is most due to the way the teams were built: not based on the knowledge or the component, but based on the interests; people that usually work on different part of the product could now share a single idea and develop something together.
Another good thing is that we could see all these ideas in a real demo; some of the projects were sharing similar features, all done in different ways: you can spend days on meetings to discuss which one is better to implement, while with this coding week we could see them live and really have a clear idea on which is better in which situation. And we can then show the new features to the project managers, who can decide to take them – maybe with the appropriate changes – into the product.
And last but not least, we’ve seen how many amazing stuffs everyone’s creativity could bring into life in just few days. Looking forward to repeat such experiment!
On November 25thm 2008, at the Dipartimento di Elettronica ed Informazione (DEI) (Sala Conferenze) of the Politecnico di Milano, there will be the first Developer Conference by