See what apps were built in a day
browseology.posterous.com
browseology.posterous.com
The day of the event, there were a handle of people on the channel who had no idea what to work on but wanted to hack something. I was amazed to find a fellow who wanted to work with me, without knowing really anything about each other. We just sat and coded for the entire day. I have no idea where he even lives or what he looks like.
But our work dynamic was great. We rarely stepped on each other's toes, we covered each others weaknesses, and we didn't have any arguments. In sum total, we sat and developed an MVP and deployed it:
http://doubleblind.at
We literally spent the first 6 hours (1/3rd of our entire effort) trying to get Twitter-Django-Oauth working, because we were convinced it was crucial. Instead, we should have considered alternatives (e.g. Friendfeed) earlier.
The organizers, who do browseology.com, created a new URL shortening service http://kiw.is. It shortens your URL and it gives your reader a 10 second personalized message before delivering the final link to them. Cute idea, right? But it might not get any attention if it was released on its own. So co-announcing this microapp as part of a one day app event---especially if only one or two things get built and deployed---will get them more attention than it would otherwise.
Lessons learned:
1. Django deployment isn't that difficult.
2. If you want to find a collaborator who will actually build stuff (instead of just talking about building stuff), participate in a one-day-app event. It automatically disqualifies people who cannot or will not actually make the time to hack. It's also a good way to determine quickly whether you and someone can work together effectively.
3. Any time you feel that something is 100% (or very) necessary it for your success, that should be a red flag. Examine this assumption before investing too heavily into it.
4. Twitter-OAuth-Django integration is a PITA, and cost us several hours. Conversely, simple authentication with Friendfeed was a breeze.
5. If you want to promote a microapp, organize a hackday and roll your announcement into the overall press release.
I am also discussing this event in the Eric Ries's lean-startup-circle group (http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/browse_th...), if you are interested.
It took several hours to get us to authenticate. The next several hours we couldn't get it to serve requests, even ones that required no authentication. We kept coding hoping that the problem would magically go away, but that never really happens.
It's conceivable that both of us were both doing something stupid, but it's also equally likely that the implementation was not simple.
My collaborator, @ricree, has some refinements to these instructions on the blog post above, following on what he did to get the authentication working. I am asking him to write those up. But we could not, I stress, make nearly all subsequent API requests, even ones that didn't require authentication.
http://www.24hourbusinesscamp.com/
We were 90 people that worked for 24 hours to build 52 "startups". The list is here: http://www.24hourbusinesscamp.com/2009/01/vote-for-your-favo... (Some of it in Swedish.)
It was an eye opening experience to build something in such a short timeframe. To say you have to focus on the essentials is an understatement. I think I slept for 2 hours before finishing the last touches in the morning. Afterwards I felt a high that lasted for weeks. This event changed me.
Here's my Flickr-set from Yasuragi where 24hbc took place: http://www.flickr.com/photos/erikstarck/sets/721576128250229...
Note the Japanese bath robes.
http://www.twilio.com/contest/netbook/ [Every monday]
https://www.code7contest.com/Default.aspx [15 Aug??]
http://www.componentart.com/community/competition2009/ [Deadline Sep 27]
http://www.ineta.org/codechallenge/ [Deadline 25th Aug]
Constraints are interesting. Twitter = 140 characters, One Day App = 24 hours. What seems like a hindrance turns out to be what makes them popular and engaging. We can show what we can accomplish in 1 day, and it makes the apps featured here that much more impressive.
I know we learned a lot about what can be optimized and where the time sinks really are when making apps that appear to be simple at first glance. There was a pretty lengthy discussion on HN over the past weeks about the perceived ease of building a site like Stack Overflow. Participating in an event like this shows you first hand all the edge cases and details that get in your way when building an app over the course of a weekend (or in this case, 24 hours). There are always things that come up that you don't think of in the planning stages. For me, I always remind myself to use less theory and more action. It's an easy trap to fall into, endlessly planning and trying to figure out everything in your mind. But in my experience it's often better to work through a problem rather than guess at how I would work through it. Sounds like a simple distinction, but it often makes a big difference.
I hope this becomes a recurring event! It was fun to see what we can accomplish in one day.
Big thanks to Chatterous for fixing up our room, Wufoo for the forms that helped keep everything in line and organized, Posterous for the sweet blog platform to help post our announcements, and all the other support we got from the community. All the participants could not have done it without you!
All the teams will add comments about their story in the blog post. So please leave us some feedback here.
We used kiw.is, a domain I had registered a few weeks ago because it was a fun name, and decided to use it for the web address and name.
We wanted an idea that could have some use to it, and also be done in a day. The technology used was all very simple, robust, secure, and well supported. All those factors made it easy. We thought up making a prestitial kind of page for people to add messages to a link that were completely customizable. Without needing to rely on messages inline with a link, such as twitter, users can now attach messages right before the actual page. Not a new idea in general, but new for this specific application of it.
It's currently in beta invite, and for the Hacker News community we made a few for you guys to try it out:
Beta Invite Code: hackernews09
I used it recently to link to a photographer's portfolio, noting the pictures I really enjoyed. I could send this across any medium and know that as it's shared, people will see this message.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/07/23/ludum-dare-15-augu...