diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index b89639799..5d6aa30f8 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -2,6 +2,19 @@
 
 The Jupyter HTML notebook is a web-based notebook environment for interactive computing.
 
+
+Dev quickstart:
+
+* Create a virtual env (ie jupyter-dev)
+* Clone this repo and cd into it
+* pip install -r requirements.txt
+* pip install -e .
+* ensure that you have node/npm install (ie brew install node)
+* npm install -g 'less@<3.0'
+* python setup.py js
+* python setup.py css
+
 Launch with:
 
     jupyter notebook
+
diff --git a/requirements.txt b/requirements.txt
index a5890f2ae..9193735c0 100644
--- a/requirements.txt
+++ b/requirements.txt
@@ -6,3 +6,4 @@
 -e git+https://github.com/ipython/ipython.git#egg=ipython
 -e git+https://github.com/ipython/ipython_kernel.git#egg=ipython_kernel
 -e git+https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter_nbconvert.git#egg=jupyter_nbconvert
+invoke