UPDATE: Sam Elliot won the contest by a long nose with the code here.

Another month, another exciting meeting. This month Robert Chatley and Matt Wynne will be running their Extreme Startup session, first shown at XP2011. Here’s the gen from Robert:

Extreme Startup

In this hands-on workshop we aim to simulate product teams building software and delivering it into a market. Attendees form teams and compete to build the best product. Through the session you can continue to refine and upgrade your software, releasing new versions and testing their performance in the market. Once your software is live it will begin to accrue points, as simulated users use the software and score it against how well it fits their needs. The earlier you release your software, the sooner you will start accruing points, and the earlier you can learn something about the market, which should inform your next iteration. In the lean startup movement, this is know as the Build-Measure-Learn cycle.

Attendees of this session will need to build a very simple webapp, probably as part of a pair or a small team, so you will need at least one laptop per team.

So that we can get started quickly, it would be helpful if participants could do a little bit of preparatory work. Set up a minimal webapp running locally on your machine that handles a GET request, with a request param ‘q’, (e.g. http://localhost:4567/?q=Adam) and returns a plain text response. For example, using Sinatra:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

configure do
  set :port, 4567
end

get '/' do
  q = params[:q]
  "Hello #{q}"
end

We will be at the usual place, The Edinburgh Training Centre on Thursday 18th August, starting at 19:30 sharp. Please try and be a little early.