f1-challenge(d)

Posted by blainegarrett

March 3, 2008

The F1 WebChallenge hosted by Twin Cities’ Sierra Bravo took place this past weekend. It was an 2 day event that helped 11 local non-profits get some help (get it? f1 = help key) on their websites. 11 teams of 88 developers (8 per team) were paired up with a non-profit that matched the skills required by the goals of the non-profit. 24+ hours of programming later, the results nearly brought some of the non-profit organizers to tears. All in all, it was an amazing event!

We had pretty much non-stop food and drink sponsored by the likes of Peace Coffee, Bruggers, Chipotle, Dominos, etc. Best Buy, VISI, iQ marketing and many other’s sponsored with raffle prizes (I won a blue ray version of “The Prestige”). There were Band Hero challenges, some sort of dance competition, and more. I got to meet a bunch of cool people including Konr Ness (team mate) who Jon talks a lot about and also the infamous Mark Courtney who I heard a lot about from when I worked at Sierra Bravo. Mark sold me a pack of smokes midway though the deal for a can of Brawndo and a few bucks.

My team was the Mighty Polymorphic Power Rangers, lead up by my good buddy Jon. Jon was so excited about the event, that he bought us all Brawndo pimp packs. It was hilarious. We figured it would make us win at staying awake… We were paired with the Riverview Economic Development Association which is a business association for one of the poorer areas of West St.Paul. Brian, the representative from REDA was awesome. He was probably the youngest representative from any of the non-profits there (probably my age), and I think that greatly helped with with the communication and such. It also helped that he was a really cool guy and very very appreciative. As, one of the judges said in the end, every non-profit said their team was the best… however, I know I saw some angry faces on some of the representative’s faces with the other teams.

Sadly, our team didn’t win the overall challenge, but we created one hell of a site for REDA that they are sure to love. The site is still in progress and our team established a continued support contract with REDA to finish up their site and allocate time for bug fixes and additional support. Brian even extended an unofficial “I’ll totally take you guys (and gal) out for beers” offer. I dig it.

We developed the site using the Zend Framework with the Justin Hendrickson’s Rend extension to ease things up. This was my first time using Zend, and while I have much experience with similar frameworks, I wanted to take a more designer oriented roll with the project. Our team had 1 strictly graphics designer, 1 guy food with CSS/Graphics/Markup, Jon and I who are all around awesome, and the rest were mostly back end peeps. So our team was programmer heavy. As such, I took more of a roll to work on markup and stylings from the designers. I gained a bunch of jQuery experience that I had otherwise not had including an awesome form UI similar to Pownce, a pretty slick image rotator, and various other bits. I also spent about an hour coming up from scratch with the UI for a google style calendar (sands a lot of bells and whistles). I was slightly proud of myself that I could bust out the PHP for the calendar on short notice since I had never done that before. Building a calendar UI is actually a bit of a logical challenge… especially at 4am. One of the other team members spent around an hour just looking for a prebuilt chunk of php to generate the calendar layout, and finally I was just like “here, let me do it”. In spite of not being around developer types much in the last year, it is good to see that my skills have not feigned much. However, I definitly was humbled in many ways. I am not up on Zend, ModX, and a lot of the stuff like installing SVN, networking, etc. I should probably know this stuff, but eh.

One thing that did get to me a bit was when all the non-profits were talking at the end. It was bittersweet since I have recently stepped down from Exec Director with Adamantine Arts. The heads of these orgs were so excited about the future of their orgs now that they had such amazing sites. I miss that sense of optimism. My optimism had been waning over the last 6 months, even in spite of starting our own mentoring program. Oh well. What is next is a blog for another day…

Anywho, that is my official post on f1. Holla.

Now that it is over, I’m feeling a bit bummed about the whole thing.

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