Making up for lost groud...

So I promised to write something regarding the VC lecture, but apparently my procrastination got the better of me..

In retrospect, now is probably a much better time to reflect on the lessons I learnt from the VC team, considering now is when I actually have to factor in so many issues with team dynamics.

First and most important lesson, recognize your limits. There are some things in life that are impossible, eg. Marrying Keira Knightley. However, most other things in life are not difficult, give some effort and time. Correction, given ENOUGH effort and time.
In a project scope with very limited time and when members have limited technical skills, clamping the feature creep is crucial to the final success. The problem with VC is that they keep coming up with new and cool features that end up requiring repeatedly rebooting the project from step 1.

Second lesson draws directly from the first, the team morale will suffer if there are too many functions that cannot be implemented, or when they have to frequently restart at square 1.

So that brings me to my third lesson, iterative design, which all of you reading this already know. Start small, always make something deployable, and then slowly expand. Even if you have to rewrite everything to incorporate an extra feature. You still have a working version deployed that you can fallback on.

Thats all for now. Stay tuned for the next installment on google wave.