Went to some of Google IO Extended Waterloo. Played with the shipwars: reactor. Stuffed my face. Listed to a keynote speaker. Listed to a talk on the google interview process and how to prepare. Ate a cookie with milk. Played with the new google pixel laptop.
Friday night:
Loaf about, shove Pepi’s pizza in face. Drink warm root beers.
Here is what startup weekend is presentation.
44 people give 60 second pitches.
I got some laughs.
Couldn’t hear what they told us to do with our pitch cards right away and the room was over crowded. I spent most of the voting time with the card taped to my chest walking around finding the 3 other pitches I wanted to vote for.
Then it turns out they wanted me to tape my pitch on the wall and stand next to it.
So I did that, but I was off in a corner. Lots of people yelling trying go get people to vote for their pitch. I didn’t vote for myself.
It got culled down to 7 or more votes. I had 6. Turns out I could have started a team even if I didn’t get enough votes, if I had enough people that wanted to work for it. But I thought I would join a team who’s pitcher was enthusiastic. So I joined based on passive environmentalism.
Our team grew to 8 people.
We had intros and we listed off ideas. One of them was to help people find local food providers. Created a Google drive to share stuff. Broke around midnight.
I missed the last bus, so I slept on a couch in the office. It was not a good night.
Saturday
Woke up 4 times. Ended up getting up around 6:15. Writing down some more ideas about the original idea of passive things like piggy backing on texting with ads or something along the idea of re-captcha.
Went downstairs and was there before 8. Locked out of the communitech hub. I sat in the hall and waited. Eventually we had 6 of our team show up and a big part of the weekend was talking to customers. So we picked our helping people find local food idea. We went to both the Kitchener and St Jacobs market. Talked to some vendors and customers. Turns out people that are at the market like going to the market.
When we came back, the other 2 members were there. We split off into three teams. Generating online hype/feedback. Market analysis. Design/Development. I was with design and development with 1 design student and 1 development student. We discussed the actions the user needs to take and went over what pages we needed and their layout. We got a github account and a amazon server up. My job was to rip data from other websites. End of the day our website said “Checkback in 2 hours” and we had a non-functional home page in the git repository. I left around 9:30. My brain was cooked. I guess we ate EVO Kitchen boxed lunch. Breakfast was egg sandwich, gogurt and fruit. I found a phone on the bus home and gave it to the driver.
Sunday
Took the first bus. Went around the atrium to get in, the gate was locked. Locked myself in the hallway between communitech and the elevator twice. Forgot my key/wallet for the elevator. Found another phone. This one was crushed. Went up to the office a few times to print of pitch notes.
So got an email from the other dev saying he wasn’t feeling well and may come in after noon. The designer was not there in the morning. So I make a few more pages for the site and actually put it up on the server. I put some of the data I ripped onto the pages. Fixed some images, created some fake images for the slide deck. Then a lot of waiting. Breakfast was same egg sandwich except this time not heated. Lunch was domino’s pizza and dinner was sushi with odo noodles.
We got to hear what startup weekend was again. Then the final 12 pitches. Projector issues. Here is where I would link to the pitches but the site I was told it would be on is not there. Our team did not come first second or third. “Congrats to #Startup Weekend Kitchener-Waterloo’s winners! @HomeFed @Fides_Social & @zerowaitthirty cc @Communitech #SWKW”
I didn’t go for after beers at the Firkin. I waited at the bus station for 40 minutes then went home.
Today my brain hurts. This is what we put together: http://www.ecoweenies.com/
Learned about some decisions to use Python. Gave a quick demo of my hack day scraper.
Interviews with 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry
Susan Lammers
A programmer interview book from 1986. It’s interesting to read about the future from people who were doing my job 27 years ago. The personal or Microcomputer becoming popular. Some talked about networking, laptops, others were about AI, 3d. The future is pretty awesome.
They talk about their past and how they fell on love with computers.
Analysts, Designers, Coders, Testers. Waterfall Software Engineering does work with huge applications but is not required for most smaller applications.
Instead a team of Software Craftsmen, Journeymen and Apprentices that stick together over a number of years and agree to support their applications for 10/20 years can work better. Focus on continual improvement.
Pretty funny. I think the judges gave some good comments on how to improve the 90 second pitches.
Enjoyable talk. No slides success. Lots of Q&A. 20 year visions.
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