Topic: Doing a startup weekend

[hans]

I signed up to do a startup weekend this coming weekend. (http://startupweekend.org) There's one in my area and I thought it might be good to go to and try and learn more stuff about running a startup and maybe a good chance for networking and such. Also, I kind of want to see what I might be able to do in 48hrs and see what sort of ideas other people have for companies.

Should be fun I hope. Otherwise, I just payed for some expensive food. But I think it'll end up to be cheap education.

[-KEN-]

Let us know how it goes  . I'm not big on meetups or anything, so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

[hans]

We took 4th place (an added last minute prize) for a slot to show progress at Minnedemo coming up (not sure when). A very rough early version is available starting at www.kickmenow.com Refresh your page after the FB auth to actually get in. Our plugin isn't able to do Oauth2 correctly I guess.

Socially motivated challenges for money (think FF pools). Challenge your friends to do stuff and take their money.

I've likely be working more on getting real features in now rather than a POC. Basic integrations were done by my great teammate who never worked with the Grails framework or FB social graph stuff before. He spent hours yesterday try to fix what ended up being a FB app configuration field that he'd left empty by accident. We tried all sorts of debugging stuff trying to figure out why it worked with my FB app but not his. Grrr.

Great experience and environment and lots of great ideas and people, but I think I'm too old for this young ultra quick startup stuff. I think I favor being a dinosaur that codes standalone apps all day. But doing the FB stuff will probably prove useful in the future I'm sure.

I'm wrecked but sort of too tired to go to sleep.

[-KEN-]

Hah, did you sleep? What part of the project did you work on? (front / back / everything?)

[hans]

About 5hrs over the weekend.

I was the lead dev since I had experience building web apps (but not facebook). I setup the AWS environment, Grails app, and worked on the core domain model (which switched multiple times) while the other dev spent most of his time figuring out how to login to facebook and pull friend lists and post status updates and such. It was just the two of us while the rest of the team worked on company strategy, setting up twitter, facebook, wordpress etc. A couple graphics guys to provide a few images here and there (many which didn't make it in yet) and they even made a 90sec video spot in case we won.

I think the weekend was worth the experience, but I'm not super anxious to go do another one right away. But the community was great and the atmosphere was the best part I think.

[hans]

I took a look at the plugin code after work today and figure out how to fix things. I committed the code tonight but still have to push it to the server. So now the login is seamless, and even better, I also figured out how to make it so you can just login from the website too instead of having to login to FB. So in theory I should be able to add back in the feature to allow people who don't give a crap about FB to use the app too (which is the way I think it should be).

The fix turned out to be fairly simple since I know Grails and the instructions made sense to me. All that was really required was to implement a javascript callback function.

I'll keep you guys posted when it gets to a point beyond POC.

[Mike]

About 5hrs over the weekend.

I was the lead dev since I had experience building web apps (but not facebook). I setup the AWS environment, Grails app, and worked on the core domain model (which switched multiple times) while the other dev spent most of his time figuring out how to login to facebook and pull friend lists and post status updates and such. It was just the two of us while the rest of the team worked on company strategy, setting up twitter, facebook, wordpress etc. A couple graphics guys to provide a few images here and there (many which didn't make it in yet) and they even made a 90sec video spot in case we won.

I think the weekend was worth the experience, but I'm not super anxious to go do another one right away. But the community was great and the atmosphere was the best part I think.

Is the website running on AWS without any other server that it pulls from?