Last weekend was one major event and one major milestone. We held an impromptu Code Academy startup weekend and it happened to coincide with the halfway point of the course- six weeks down and six weeks to go (although I’m late in posting this so we’re almost at the 5 week to go mark). Here’s a recap of the weekend.

At 7pm on Friday we pitched ideas, discussed, voted and speed-dated and by the end of the night split up into teams and started modeling out our ideas. I pitched a pair of ideas that made it into the final round: a site to shop for local handmade goods and a scheduling app for small businesses to use. The scheduling app wasn’t quite sexy enough to attract a team so I joined Tom Brown, Steve Sedowski and Michael Verdi on the Handmade.Local team. We worked until about 1 AM wireframing, writing out user stories and deciding what functionality we wanted to build into the app. Our approach to the challenge was to implement as many of the concepts we’ve learned as possible and then spend Saturday and Sunday writing out code.

On Saturday we were back at it by 10 AM and ended up working until about 1 AM. Tom focused on implementing Paperclip so that sellers could upload images of their items for sale, and Steve and Michael got started building out the foundation of the app. They had some database problems so had to dig deep into the migrations to figure out what was wrong. I built out a quick sample app to get the geocoder gem up and running so that we could allow visitors to Handmade.Local to see where the general location of where an item was for sale and also see a list of handmade goods for sale in their neighborhood. Once I got the gist of that I handed it over to Steve so that he could get some practice with it and incorporate it into the app. I then helped Michael start to incorporate filters into the app so that users couldn’t stumble (or hard code a URL) into any part of the site that they weren’t supposed to.

By the light of Sunday morning (which Steve and Tom never saw because they just slept in the building!), we realized we had to pull back on a few things in order to have something ready to roll by 5pm on Sunday. Michael and I had played around with some pre-packaged CSS but decided to scrap it and just roll our own basic formatting. I also threw together a quick logo while Steve continued work on the geocoder gem and Tom wrapped up the work on Paperclip and pushed everything to Heroku for a live site. Our presentation went pretty smoothly with the exception of one broken link. We clicked on the “favorites” list only to get an error because we forgot to clean out some old data. However, broken link and all we still received the “Code Academy Spirit Award” because we incorporated the most things that we learned from class… and if only we’d had another hour or so I’m pretty sure we could have even snuck in that Javascript we started on last week.

The weekend was a great experience and everyone who participated was pretty amazed to see just how far we’ve come in six weeks. Our team is going to meet again on Friday to do some follow up work on Handmade.Local and once we’ve worked out most of the bugs I’ll be sure to send out a link.

This post has gotten pretty long without even mentioning The Long Road so I’ll save that for later.