Well, I’ll finally have time to write on my blog again. As of Friday, I’ve left development on TipDish.

There were many reasons for my decision to leave the group, which I won’t go into in depth here. Very simply, the project was going in a direction that I simply did not agree with, so I felt it better to be on my way than to start a firestorm of in-fighting.

Despite my eventual departure from the project, I still very much consider it a worthwhile experience. I learned alot from it and not just on the programming side of things.

I learned the crucial importance of starting a company with people you know and trust. I don’t mean to speak ill of Startup Weekend; I believe the ideal of the event is a noble one. Unfortunately, the practical reality is that, due to the nature of Startup Weekend, the group of people you end up working with is largely random. Many of the people are great; inevitably some will be untrustworthy, unreliable, or down-right trouble-makers. You also have no control of the composition of the group, so it’s possible to end up like we did, with only a handful of people with the technical expertise required to pull something like this off, and a large group of by-standers.

I learned the demands of a project this size, the technical requirements and some of the major speed-bumps and potholes along the way.

I learned the importance of a clearly defined objective and a good plan to see it into fruition. Even as I was making my exit from TipDish there were still major areas of concern that had not been planned or in some cases even thought about.

And of course, I learned Rails. You can read all the books, blogs, tutorials, and articles, listen to all the podcasts and screencasts, etc., but until you actually work on a bona fide application, it never truly clicks. I don’t pretend to have it all down even at this point, but I am leaps and bounds ahead of where I was previous to Startup Weekend.

So, all in all, it was a good experience. Part of me is sad to leave the project, but part of me is also relieved beyond measure. And with that, I close the chapter on TipDish.