An interesting case study over at the CakePHP site about Mingle2, a dating site built in “66.5 Hours.”

What I liked about the case study was the developer talked about techniques he used to flesh out features and manage scope. IMO scope control is your most powerful weapon in getting something developed quickly — many projects can get bogged down with small details that aren”t as important yet end up taking a lot of time.

I believe there was a quote I read once, something like “the first 80% of a project takes 80% of the time, and the other online casino 20% takes the other 80% of the time.” Or other variants of the 80/20 rule, like “20% of the effort is spent on 80% of the features,” etc.

Feel free to make up your own quote, using the numbers “80” and “20,” that basically means you can deliver a subset of features significantly faster than an entire set of features, so to develop sites quickly, you should select a good subset of features and build those.

Since the case study is about a dating site, I should probably point out that the developer is single, which gives him more time to put towards startups. I only mention this because Paul Graham blatantly said he “wouldn”t advise anyone with a family to start a startup” and “to start startups when you”re young.” (point #9 in Why to Not Not Start a Startup)

So all you Web 2.0 barons out there — ditch your significant others for the time being & crank out that web site. Once you”re rich from getting acquired by Google, you can try to convince your lost love to come back with expensive reconciliation gifts.

Wait…how did this “rapid development” post turn from scope management to dumping girlfriends? Man, blogs are funny.