Wow. What a rush.
Those are the two things I thought right when I clicked the “Submit App” button at 1:55pm on Sunday.
After 48 hours of furious coding, our two HI Capacity teams banged out two working websites. Team 1 (@ryankanno, @jdcouncil, @sonwright, @austenito) created Videos with Friends a site that let’s you watch videos while watching your friends.
Team 2 (@synthes1s @hawaiidesigner @AdoboDreamWeavr, Julie Sakuda) created StreamBurst, which shows your twitter stream in real time in a slick interface.
Please spend some time and vote for us by clicking on the “Vote” button. We want to win!
It was an amazing, adrenaline pumping, knock your socks off experience. Both teams slept very little and worked till the sun came up, went down, then came back up again. No matter where we place when judging is completed next week, I feel that our first every competition was a success!
It was a fantastic learning experience for everyone involved. If you’ve never participated in a weekend coding competition, it comes highly recommend. And what do you know, Startup Weekend Honolulu is right around the corner.
There were tons of things we could have done better, but here is some of what we learned along the way:
- Get some sleep. Even with a tight deadline having quick power naps will help you in the long run. Staying up for 30 hours straight isn't helping anyone.
- Create a priority list of things to do. Once the competition starts you can't spend time figuring out what's next. Create an Minimal Viable Product followed by a priority sorted list of features. This was invaluable.
- You're going to run into problems along the way. Expect them. Things were moving along smoothly. We knew what needed to be done and how to do them. Then we found a bug in the module we were using. Then Linode kept crashing. Then we were behind and scrambling to get things in order. I don't have any advice here except to realize that something bad is going to hit the fan at some point.
- Give yourself at least a couple hours to fix things. You probably need more than a couple hours, but it turned out to be a last minute dash to fix all of the show stopping bugs. In the end we didn't fix all of them and it hurts.
I’m completely and utterly addicted to these types of competitions. I can’t wait till next month’s Startup Weekend and Rails Rumble in October. I hope to see you all there.
Wow. What a rush!