Subscribe (RSS)Today was wild to say the least. We’ve got alot of very talented people, but unfortunately not alot whose expertise lies in development. My push for Rails as our app’s platform has positioned me as the sole programmer on the job.
Thankfully, though, I have some good people with me who have covered side-issues and freed me up to just code. Even still, it was quite a stressful day for me. With my mere two months of Rails experience, and no full apps under my belt as yet, I’ve had to accumulate a good deal of working knowledge today.
To aggravate matters, this morning, scope-creep began to rear its ugly head and continued to do so most of the day. By mid-afternoon, my list of tasks had become enough to occupy a good week or two of development, which obviously began to create and increasing sense of doom in me.
I was determined to finish for the sake of the group, but I admit that the thought crossed my mind more than once to simply say screw it and walk out. Eventually, I was able to speak with user experience team and encourage them to refocus the app: deciding what were the most absolute crucial parts and what could be added after our launch tomorrow. Not surprisingly, there was very little that was absolutely crucial for launch, most of which I already have complete.
Tomorrow, I should be able to finish up the rest of the crucial aspects by mid-morning, and begin to work on implementing some secondary matters, just to make the app a little more complete. I’m much less stressed at this point, and I’m actually starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I guess I should mention some of the major developments today. We decided on a name: TipDish. ‘Tip’, is a reference to The Tipping Point, and ‘Dish’ as in ‘the latest dish’. We have very chic user groups. The ‘Dishers’ are the bloggers, social media users, and such who will be putting out the word. The ‘Tippers’ are the PR and Marketing firms who will be submitting press releases. The naming scheme has grown on me a bit throughout the day, and is starting to become a more natural way of referring to our future user base. I do, however, wish the group had come to this naming scheme before I had already created most of the models and controllers. It was not much fun going back through all my code and renaming everything.
Probably the greatest incentive I’ve received from this weekend so far is the sheer support and confidence from the rest of the team. There were points where I was seriously believing that our launch would not go off and it would all be my fault, but the group seems to have had much more confidence in me than I’ve had in myself. I don’t think I would have been able to make it this far without that.
Now, while I’ve been doing all the programming, I don’t intend to convey that I’ve done all the work. I’m amazed at how much the team as a whole has accomplished this weekend. In fact, they accomplished so much that I always had a sense of disorientation when I was finally drawn out from my little cell upstairs to rejoin the group at large for a meeting or meal. I feel extremely honored to have had the opportunity to work with all the people at Startup Weekend Houston, and that feeling will likely continue to grow as we go into our launch tomorrow.
And, FYI, the launch is planned for 2pm tomorrow, which will be impressive, indeed.
Tags: startup weekend, tipdish
