If there’s one thing I really like, is rapid development. This means I got pretty excited when I was going through some blogs and found this blog post from a few days ago over at the awesome Creating Passionate Users. Basically, the post talks about a talk at the Friends of O’Reilly camp by Squirrel Eiserloh on total immersion / ultra-rapid game development. Now you’ll probably scream “oh what are you talking about, Fred? Games?”.

No, this ain’t about games. This is about my favourite way of getting ideas and fast prototypes out there. About the way I love to develop software, and about the way I’ve been doing some pieces of software for the last few years. Oh, the good days of the demoscene. The 24h/48h do-nothing-else coding sessions. You know, porn for geeks with nothing better to do.

Ummm seriously now. What better way to use (and abuse) teamwork and get the most out of people than a creative jamming session of anything? Because you know, this is not just about code. So roll up your sleeves, get a place that’s good enough to code and crash at, get some friends over and actually do stuff! You’ll have fun, and if you set goals that everyone must acomplish - be that finishing a product, tackling some new features, fixing bugs, creating the next bestestest rock album -, you’ll get stuff *done*!

When I fly to San Francisco in a few days, I’ll be lining up a few of these nights, working on rolling out something cool for O’Reillys Web 2.0 Conference (oh soon, soon). But apart from that, make sure you let me know if there’s any other hackathons going on for web 2.0 people in SF/Palo Alto, because it’s a great way to get acquainted with everyone else in the area. I was always jealous of the cool stuff like Tag Tuesdays and the Super Happy Devhouse (photos by the guys at Laughing Squid), so since I’m coming to town, I might as well have some code-fun.

People who are into this sort of stuff may also like Dorkbot and similar organizations. Me, oh, I love them. Get cracking.

Notes: Oh, and if you need more links for inspiration, here’s the notes from Six Aparts hackathon, Feedburner, and from the guys at Jotspot. Startups can have fun too. In fact, start-ups deserve all the fun, because once you go corp, there’s no code + drinks sessions with the board.