I don't have much to report from the afternoon sessions today, generally I'm disappointed in the sessions I sat in on, two were just total fluff though they got lots of applause.

Jason Fried -- 37 Signals

One high point was Jason Fried speaking about lessons learned at 37 Signals from building Basecamp. He organized his speech around four themes:

1. Reducing mass
2. Embracing constraints
3. Getting Real
4. Managing debt

Reducing mass — keep things small and controllable. Implement changes incrementally, don't pack a lot of features into one big release.

Embracing constraints — that many organizations fear constraints and go to great lengths to avoid them, and are unprepared when they encounter them eventually. Constraints create creativity, they're where creativity happens. He cited an example that when they launched Basecamp, they had not figured out how to implement billing. They had 30 days to resolve that little problem since they had a 30 day free trial. The tradeoff was that they got to focus their time on developing the base product, rather than get distracted by the development and implementation of billing.

Getting real — they started by designing the UI and focussed on "real" prototypes, rather than churning code for awhile and then looking at the prototype.

Managing debt — covering both financial debt as well as project debt. That debt in projects is the payment you have to do sooner or later when you make tradeoffs in decisions. If you implement a hack to get around a certain problem, some time down the road it may (will) resurface and you'll have to deal with it...that's debt. It's not necessarily something to avoid, but you need to be aware of it.

He also talked about decisions...that people spend a lot of time trying to make the right decision, make it, and then thrash afterwards. Decisions are transitory events. You mae the decision you make based on the information you have, and move on. If the context changes (and it always does), the decision may no longer seem wise, or may even be proven incorrect. You can't hold off on making the decision on the fear that it may or may not be correct.