RTP Startup Weekend day two started at 9:00. We started yesterday with five startup companies, and by the end of today, one folded leaving us with four: MyFriesSuck, scavenja, barsforus, and dealcastr.
I sauntered in at 9:30, and the team was already at it. They were all sitting around a conference table, mostly looking at—or interacting with—their laptops. One or two were chatting.
Breakfast consisted of coffee, compliments of Helios, one of the sponsors of RTP Startup Weekend, orange juice, and Krispy Kreme donuts.
As it turned out, people were “learning by doing” creating “tickets” and “notebook” entries in an online project management collaborative tool called Infozerk. I created a ticket for myself called, “Developer Help and Error Messages” and that’s what I worked on most of the day. Specifically, I created our potential set of FAQs for the site.
These designers and developers mentioned Ruby on Rails several times today, and I don’t know why, but my immediate thought each time after hearing it was, “Pit Bulls on Crack.” Something about the common preposition, or the cadence, or something.
One of my contributions today was to make some notes about things to consider whenever we get to the point of creating the reports that we’re going to sell to companies:
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We need to think about what we want these reports to contain. For every technical communication, we should consider audience, context, purpose. So, in this case: Who is the audience for the report? In what context will they be viewing/using the data? For what purpose will the user/reader use the report? |
The excitement built throughout the day as the designers and developers on the team coded furiously and continuously in rapid prototype development mode.
Lunch today was from Jersey Mikes, with a nice choice of turkey subs, ham subs, and cheese subs. I love Jersey Mikes.
I left for a couple of hours today, during which I ran to Planet Fitness and did my upper body workout.
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Resistance (Upper Body) |
45 |
Dinner this evening was catered by Neomonde, and it was most delicious. We had a choice of a couple different kind of grilled meat kabobs, pita points, hummus, tabouli, and a choice of various phyllo-based desserts.
Some of us had trouble getting to the server upon which our Web site was being developed, and coming to fruition. It was eventually diagnosed as a DNS problem, as we were able to get to it via its IP address, so that sufficed for the evening.
At about 6:30, we had a status update from all four projects. Each of our spokesperson talked about our progress to-date today, and how it looked in terms of getting something done by tomorrow night.
I spent a good portion of this evening devising my blog entry for yesterday.
I hadn’t planned on going out this evening, but Joe called at around 9:30, and things were actually winding down. I had really expected the work to go late into the evening, so took advantage of the situation and met Joe over at Flex at around 11:00.
It was crowded as crazy in the place, and equally as hot—and not in a good way. We spent most of the time talking with Phil, Joe, and their friend Steve, and standing by the one pool table over which the air conditioning flows.