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.

This is us on the first day testing out our cameras

Team 2 Going Strong!

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!

Hello everybody! We’re always trying to move the HI Capacity forward. Most people don’t really see the business behind it but we’re trying to change that. We’re going to keep you up to date on our progress more in the future. We are writing business plans and projections. We’re determining the best price point for membership and looking at generating revenue from other sources. We’re also looking to get capital to start the space.

We need all of this to prove that we’re a legitimate entity. We’re here to make an awesome maker space and absolutely serious about doing so. Whether you’re a developer, interested in making your own homebrew beer, an electronics hacker or just want to make things, we’ll be the space in Honolulu that you’ll want to go to.

We have tons of projects you can help with or you can create your own. Because we have so many projects going on, we need a space. We’re going to try to partner up with The Box Jelly. They have the business expertise to help us find a space and help us determine a good plan of action to keep HI Capacity sustainable.

Most of all though, we need your help. We need your assistance funding the space and the build out. This is going to take considerable effort on our part to get the space that you desire. Please click the donate button at the bottom of this post to help us bootstrap HI Capacity into one of the best makerspaces in the country.

HI Capacity has just released Dealios, the chrome extension allowing you to view deal sites from the comfort of your browser. No longer will you have to rush to your email inbox or RSS feed reader to figure out what’s the hot deals for today.

Features include:

• Honolulu supports Hot Deals Hawaii, Groupon, Living Social
• Chicago supports Groupon
• Extension icon changes color to notify you when a new deal is posted

We’ve also pushed the Dealios source code up to the HI Capacity GitHub account. Like any project, there’s always room for improvement. Go ahead and fork the repository and add your city or additional deal sites, create a deal site API for the chrome extension to use, anything you can imagine.

HI Capacity wants you to push tech forward. Making improvements to Dealios is just one way to get there.

Happy Hacking!