3:30 PM Saturday Room: 8402
Get Idea! Build a Product! Sell it!
We've all spent too many hours and too much damn money with this approach only to fail in the end.
Mark will teach you had to turn this "Conventional Engineer's Wisdom" on its head and build products that people will buy on day one. Many times, we engineers build features without ever talking to the customers and users who they benefit.
We'll start with the absolute basics: how to define your customer and discover what their true problem is. "But I don't have any customers or users!" you will say. You will learn how and where to find them and then how to engage them in meaningful conversation about their problems. Our goal? Build the right solution for the right customer and make them ultimately beg you for your solution.
Teaching with examples, Mark will share his specific experiences finding customers and how to talk to them. We'll run through several tools, tips and tricks Mark used to find success (after years of failing).
This is a unique opportunity to learn nuggets of Lean Startup wisdom from one of the Bay Area's most enthusiastic trainers and mentors. 5:00 PM Saturday Room: 8402
Mark will cover the basics of designing and setting up a database schema. He'll define some common business scenarios, build out some tables, create relationships, and then demo usage, pitfalls, problems and design tradeoffs. With so many database-driven projects for consumer desktop software applications, websites and enterprise software systems, the database design plays a crucial role in the success of your project. You'll see real-life examples and issues such as: Creating a new table; Choosing data types; Normalization (and when to denormalize); Types of relationships; Referential integrity; Join/relationship tables; 1-to-many, many-to-many; How to actually use these structures in your application; While the examples will focus on SQL Server, the techniques and SQL code will work for virtually any SQL database. There will be discussion of various commercial and open source tools to streamline your work.