What can you cut out?

“I have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” – Blaise Pascal

I was a mentor for Go Code Colorado over the weekend (mentioned previously). It was a good experience. About 10 teams, 30 mentors, and a couple of hours. I had a lot of fun chatting with the teams, which were all using open data provided on the Colorado Information Marketplace to build an app that will serve a need. They divided the mentors up into functional areas (data science, marketing, developer, startup vet, etc) and let us wander amongst the teams. Sometimes I felt a bit useless (one team was trying to debug a Meteor app that would run locally but failed when deployed to a web server) and other times I felt like I was a bit of a bother (since the teams were also trying to get stuff done while being “mentored”). But for the most part I had interesting conversations about what the teams were trying to accomplish and the best means of doing so from a technical perspective.

One thing that came up again and again was “what can you cut out”. The teams have a fixed timeline (they are only allowed to work until the final competition in early June) and some of the ideas were pretty big. My continuing refrain was:

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