Wow! Good to be back in the blogging community again. Today, i want to share some very important lessons i learnt during the last start up weekend Lagos programming contest.
The competition started 9th of September and ended 11th September. Now first and foremost meet my team mates and the roles they played:
1)Abiodun Thorpe--Optimization and Team lead
2)Deji Techserv--web UI
3)Lawal Ibrahim--Php -MySql,Backend
4)Aguda Olabode--web UI
5)Ijaware Tomiwa--mobile css
6)Samuel Okoroafor--mobile Web (me)
7)Kazeem---GPS tracker guy
Now the competition started on a good note with me and my team mates quickly reaching an understanding of what we wanted to achieve and our aim at that event which was to win.
We drafted responsibilities and everyone acknowledged their roles and we went to our various homes(though Thorpe and Ibrahim slept over at Ibrahim's house) to resume our duties.
The following morning, 10th September,we assembled at the venue and merged our individual efforts and continued with the project's core areas. I provided the mobile web forms, Tomiwa styled them, Bode and Deji kept working on the web UI while Ibrahim did a lot of work on the backend (php and MySql). Kazeem continued work on the GPS data and Thorpe on the presentation,optimization and team coordination.
We worked our way into the night coding all through till we dispersed from the venue. I went with Ibrahim, Deji and Thorpe to Ibrahim's place to spend the night. I was up working on various issues through the night and some chatting. Ibrahim later commenced work on the backend while i provided all the info from our mobile client. We worked till dawn and continued even when we got to the venue. Soon our model and solution were complete. We were the only ones who finished their project over the weekend and we all got ready for the final presentation.
Thorpe delivered the presentation for us. The criteria used for the classification of winners became obvious to us after the event. They were looking for power packed presentations and not necessarily complete projects and though we did a good job on the project to get a workable product,we were a bit at fault in our presentation and we paid dearly for it.
The results were announced starting with the first. As soon as we realised that we weren't first it became obvious to us that we had lost.
Though we were reassured that the prizes were just to motivate enterpreneurship in us all,we felt disappointed in ourselves seeing we had the best collection of programmers at the event and couldn' t claim the 1000 Euros prize.
Lessons learnt
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1)A product is as good as it's presentation irrespective of the contents
2)Never underestimate your opposition even if you're in the best position to win
3)Always stick together as a team irrespective of the outcomes of why you all came together
4)Competition results don't necessarily determine the best of the best..The results are barely relative to what the judges think which is quite narrow
As the event came and went i realized that it was going to be the last event i was going to lose at! It was fun all the way and i met quite a lot of interesting and funny peeps..Thanks for reading. Watch out for the update for the upcoming Tech-In series competition. enjoy!
