The longer story

The original concept for RFP was to build software products from scratch in a limited time frame. The only requirement was those products should be ready to go live at the end of that period. Those limitations would force us to make decisions, focus on the essentials, and skip many of the discussions regarding software products that are popular these days. Then we would write about how we built them and move on to the next cool thing.

We shaped the idea, changed the parts that could turn the project into a nightmare (e.g., the limited time frame when developing a new product), and gave it a name, which is where we are now.

There are constraints in our lives forcing us to be smart on how we will make RFP a successful project. The three of us have full-time jobs we want to keep and a life to live outside the computers. We follow some practices to respect them.

Every conversation we have is async. There’s a GitHub board to save dev-related stuff and project ideas, and a chat group where we talk with each other when possible.

Elixir and Phoenix are our dev stack for all projects. It is the stack we are most productive and probably the best combo for building software products with a small team these days, as well as Ruby on Rails and Hotwire.

Our time is for the craft. We don’t have the luxury of thinking about refinements, hype of new technologies, daily rituals, Jira boards, microservices, and everything that moves us away from our goal, which is to create great products.

Things are working great so far. Following those practices, we built and redesigned our website and brand, created LiveMatch in three weeks - which appeared on ElixirWeekly, Elixir Radar, and Café com Elixir, and accumulated 3.5k visits so far. We shaped other ideas too, which will become a priority in the following months.

RFP is how we build things we want, the way we want, with talented people - we have 30+ years of experience combined - and, most importantly, respecting our time. The plan is always share what we build and how we do it, but also other ideas we have on software, design, and products.

If you believe in the same things we do and want to build something with us, feel free to get in touch at hi@readyforproduction.dev.

See you in the next post!