Subscribe (RSS)I was really sick by Sunday, so when Startup Weekend Houston wrapped up. I just went home and went to bed. Hence, why I haven’t posted about it, yet. But I figured it was about time for me to go ahead and write a post about how the weekend ended.
Sunday brought with it a world of problems. Even Sunday, we were still getting new wireframes and concepts, some of which required changes to the existing code. The template for our site was still going through design changes even up to 8pm Sunday.
Around noon, the Devs got some help, though, in form of two remote Rails developers, Jake and Brian. Brian set to work on the dashboard pages, but unfortunately didn’t get very far. Jake set up our server and helped us deploy TipDish to a subdomain so we could all view it live. Thanks Jake! Don’t know what we would have done without you.
I on the other hand got distracted by other issues. A few people couldn’t checkout from our subversion respository, which oddly enough eventually corrected itself, but not until I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure it out. Then, my working copy of TipDish got corrupted somehow, to the point where I couldn’t even boot webrick. Eventually, I gave up on trying to troubleshoot it and just removed the directory and checked it out again, which worked, but I lost some of what I had worked on.
Late into the evening, it became apparent that our template was simply unmanageable. I had noticed problems in it, but figured it could always be fixed after the weekend when we would have more time. Not so. Erica and Kelsey spent quite a while fixing the version of the template on our live domain. But, even now, no work has been done on the app’s version.
Needless to say, TipDish did not launch Sunday night, which was a little disappointing. Yet, an entire web app is a tall order for one weekend, and TipDish is a rather complex web app, making it an even taller order.
There is good news, though, many in the group committed to stay on the project, including myself. We plan to powwow sometime this week to get our bearings and see where we’re at. I also just found out that we’ll most likely be presenting at the 5th Annual Information Technology and Web 2.0 Venture Forum on Thursday, November 8, 2007 at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Which of course means that TipDish will have to launch before November 8th. I’d like to see it happen sooner than that, though, and I think it’s entirely possible that it could launch within 2 weeks.
In the meantime, anyone can signup for info at TipDish.com. I’ll be posting updates here, of course, and there’s always the Startup Weekend Houston blog. Actually, if I’m not mistaken, TipDish should be getting its own blog too, but I’ll have to get back to everyone on that.
Tags: startup weekend, tipdish
