Deathy's blog

To sum it up in one word: awesome

Now for the longer version..

So this past weekend ( 26-27th of February ) I participated at GeekMeet24. Everyone gathered, teamed-up, and did their best to end up with a good web application at the end of the weekend.

I was involved in the Freeconomy project, meant as an easy way to share or give away unused items. Social-sharing you may call it, so of course we built a social app on the Facebook platform

The Freeconomy team was: Teo (original idea) Calin (programming), Alina (copywriting), Cristi (design) and Me (programming).

It was a very full two days (12 hours in each day actually), with lots of discussions, lots of coding. Sure, it was somewhat tiring but in the end we all learned a lot and felt better for the experience.

What I did:

Programming in PHP, using the CakePHP framework and working with the Facebook API. So mainly things which I don’t do usually, but I think that’s the best part. I learned a lot of new things during the development of the project.

The more special roles I consider I took are:

- hosting provider: I set up a subdomain, vhost, and anything else needed so we could have the application online as fast as possible. This is a must to fully test how the application will behave in a real environment.

- git advocate: not that I know git very well or that Calin took a lot of convincing, but I feel it helped us a lot.

What went well:

We communicated without problems and everyone shared their opinions. That’s always good in any process, not only software development.

From the programming side, we weren’t afraid to refactor/rewrite anything.

Maria Diaconu kept “bugging” us to FOCUS! Although my reaction at the moment didn’t show it, I know it helped all of the teams.

What difficulties we encountered:

Most difficulties were encountered with the Facebook platform. Not that the API isn’t good, but it’s just a lot to take in at once.

Also, I usually prefer to test everything locally but with a Facebook app there’s some things which really must go through Facebook for you to see how they will behave. This also somewhat hindered a fully-parallel development process.

We didn’t finish everything we set up to do but that was to be expected. We’re still working on the application and will have more updates soon.

I’ll probably add more information as I remember it…

On the organizational/logistical side the whole team of GeekMeet24 were great.  The space was big enough for all the teams, we had all the necessary conditions and were very well-fed ( Thanks KFC ). KFC, Pizza, Cola, Power sockets, nice company, we had all of them.

Also, great thanks to Radu Ticiu from the Timisoara Software Business Incubator for giving us the space and the right conditions to work in. I don’t know if we could have found a better place anywhere else and hope to enjoy more events there in the future

Some personal conclusions which I’ll take to the next similar project:

- Always use revision control and set it up as fast as possible. Git of course is the fastest and easiest to set up so it’s a clear winner for small of time-constrained projects where you don’t want to waste even an hour configuring SVN or something else.

- You can’t build a web application locally, always have some remote server configured. You especially want to avoid the problems that it works on your machine but not after deploying to your hosting environment.

- I’m gonna be more organized.