diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index b89639799..ac7de7f6e 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -2,6 +2,18 @@
 
 The Jupyter HTML notebook is a web-based notebook environment for interactive computing.
 
+Dev quickstart:
+
+* Create a virtual env (ie jupyter-dev)
+* ensure that you have node/npm installed (ie brew install node on OS X)
+* Clone this repo and cd into it
+* pip install -r requirements.txt
+* pip install -e .
+
+_NOTE_: For Debian/Ubuntu systems, if you're installing the system node you need
+to use the 'nodejs-legacy' package and not the 'node' package.
+
 Launch with:
 
     jupyter notebook
+