PHP Throwdown - debriefing!
Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2007 2:38 pm
crap - I hit refresh and lost my post
This will be somewhat less eloquent:
So we decided to make a flash card database website, where people could find, use, create and share flash cards. The general idea was a study aid, pumped up with all the web 2.0 goodness that seems to be all the rage these days.
At Ole's suggestion, we spent a few hours on Wednesday doing a "dry run" of sorts. We've posted previously about the "three hour spree" as it came to be known, so I won't go into any great detail here. Needless to say, that experience would save our collective bacon during the contest.
The day before the contest was spent in preparation. Ole made up several revisions of a UML that would go on to serve as our road map / checklist. Dave wrote up numerous docs and schema for everything from the database structure to the website overview, and I spent some time designing some UI mock-ups on paper, and then in Photoshop. We also bought a domain and started a backup SVN server, just in case. Aaron was also with us for the spree and some of the planning, but he never made it to the contest sadly (he warned us this could be the case).
I don't think any of us really got nearly enough sleep the night before the event, and to make matters worse Dave and I are both in GMT -5:00, so the start time was at 7am (early for any geek)! This would prove hardest on ole though, who was able to remain conscious until 7am GMT - I real trooper.
At the start of the contest, our SVN credentials didn't work. We spent some time trying to connect and having our password reset, but in the end we gave up and used our own SVN server that was thankfully already set up. Once that issue was out of the way, we were able to start coding. Dave and ole were immediately knee-deep in Zend framework and I was busy getting the front end worked out.
We stayed connected in Skype for most of the contest, mostly with a conference channel open, and always with the chat window up. Looking back, I'm forced to wonder if it wouldn't have been easier to concentrate if we we're in less communication. I often found myself listening to discussions about the Zend framework when I should have been concentrating on what I was doing. I suppose that we're a rather self selected group that way though, since we all met on phpDN
All in all, we got exponentially less productive as we got more exhausted. This is where the 24 hour time limit becomes a real challenge. I'm sure that if we'd broken it up into three 8 hour days we'd have gotten far more accomplished, but I guess that's part of the competition.
By the end of the project, we'd successfully built every layer of functionality we'd aimed for, which is a fantastic thing to be able to say. Given a little more time, we'll be able to add more UI and a few features, but the core site works, and that's worth celebrating
We ended up buying http://flashcardr.com as a tongue-in-cheek reference to a [urlhttp://flickr.com]popular photo site[/url]. While we did put our end code up on the server at the end of the night, it's fairly useless to the casual surfer at this point. We all agreed that it's a project we'll continue to work on in the future. You are all welcome to join us.
In the meantime, please feel free to play with a couple of our rudimentary demo pages:
http://flashcardr.com/deck/display/id/1
http://flashcardr.com/deck/sort/id/1
More than a semi-working demo, I think we all took something away from this experience that's invaluable. I had never worked on software in a collaborative environment before, nor had I made any real use of SVN. I know Dave and ole also feel the experience was generally enriching, but I'll let them share their own opinions.
Cheers,
Kieran
The-PHP-DN-TD-Ninja-Space-Team-Crew, and flashcardr
So we decided to make a flash card database website, where people could find, use, create and share flash cards. The general idea was a study aid, pumped up with all the web 2.0 goodness that seems to be all the rage these days.
At Ole's suggestion, we spent a few hours on Wednesday doing a "dry run" of sorts. We've posted previously about the "three hour spree" as it came to be known, so I won't go into any great detail here. Needless to say, that experience would save our collective bacon during the contest.
The day before the contest was spent in preparation. Ole made up several revisions of a UML that would go on to serve as our road map / checklist. Dave wrote up numerous docs and schema for everything from the database structure to the website overview, and I spent some time designing some UI mock-ups on paper, and then in Photoshop. We also bought a domain and started a backup SVN server, just in case. Aaron was also with us for the spree and some of the planning, but he never made it to the contest sadly (he warned us this could be the case).
I don't think any of us really got nearly enough sleep the night before the event, and to make matters worse Dave and I are both in GMT -5:00, so the start time was at 7am (early for any geek)! This would prove hardest on ole though, who was able to remain conscious until 7am GMT - I real trooper.
At the start of the contest, our SVN credentials didn't work. We spent some time trying to connect and having our password reset, but in the end we gave up and used our own SVN server that was thankfully already set up. Once that issue was out of the way, we were able to start coding. Dave and ole were immediately knee-deep in Zend framework and I was busy getting the front end worked out.
We stayed connected in Skype for most of the contest, mostly with a conference channel open, and always with the chat window up. Looking back, I'm forced to wonder if it wouldn't have been easier to concentrate if we we're in less communication. I often found myself listening to discussions about the Zend framework when I should have been concentrating on what I was doing. I suppose that we're a rather self selected group that way though, since we all met on phpDN
All in all, we got exponentially less productive as we got more exhausted. This is where the 24 hour time limit becomes a real challenge. I'm sure that if we'd broken it up into three 8 hour days we'd have gotten far more accomplished, but I guess that's part of the competition.
By the end of the project, we'd successfully built every layer of functionality we'd aimed for, which is a fantastic thing to be able to say. Given a little more time, we'll be able to add more UI and a few features, but the core site works, and that's worth celebrating
We ended up buying http://flashcardr.com as a tongue-in-cheek reference to a [urlhttp://flickr.com]popular photo site[/url]. While we did put our end code up on the server at the end of the night, it's fairly useless to the casual surfer at this point. We all agreed that it's a project we'll continue to work on in the future. You are all welcome to join us.
In the meantime, please feel free to play with a couple of our rudimentary demo pages:
http://flashcardr.com/deck/display/id/1
http://flashcardr.com/deck/sort/id/1
More than a semi-working demo, I think we all took something away from this experience that's invaluable. I had never worked on software in a collaborative environment before, nor had I made any real use of SVN. I know Dave and ole also feel the experience was generally enriching, but I'll let them share their own opinions.
Cheers,
Kieran
The-PHP-DN-TD-Ninja-Space-Team-Crew, and flashcardr