Day 3 of Startup Weekend was a bit of a blur, contributed to by a lack of sleep combined with a rushed deadline. Early in the day, things were looking positive for a midnight release with a significant batch of features. We were continuing to add and improve upon features, and designers were working on getting mockups of key pages together. Unfortunately, things did not continue to go smoothly throughout the day.

Funky Problems

We ran into a couple of odd Rails problems - first we had trouble with the Rails image_tag method.

<%= image_tag @photo.public_filename %>

Running the above would result in the following error

You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
The error occurred while evaluating nil.to_sym

After spending quite some time trying to debug the error, we eventually gave up and hard-coded @photo.public_filename into the <img src=""> tag.

The second strange problem was with the restful_authentication. Though I couldn't replicate the error on my box, other team members were receiving errors about a frozen object.

We were, unfortunately, unable to resolve either problem and ended up writing some hackish code to make things work. These two issues ate up time that could have been spent on important features.

Incorporating the Design

On Saturday, the designers told us they'd be able to code up the XHTML/CSS so we could concentrate on delivering features. The design team, however, was quite small compared to the development team, and just didn't have the manpower to deliver on that goal. Throughout the day the design team worked on creating mockups of key pages for us. The mockups looked outstanding, but, unfortunately, turned out to be graphical, rather than XHTML/CSS mockups, which meant we had to slice them up ourselves. Several developers took a turn at working on the CSS, and a homepage and inner template were pieced together.

Shaving Features To Make Launch

As midnight loomed, it became obvious that we'd be unable to launch with a full feature set as planned. Strange rails problems, along with having to incorporate the CSS, just sapped too much of our development strength. To make matters worse, we didn't receive access to our production server until mid-day, which meant one developer had to spend most of his day dealing with server-related issues. As a result, we began cutting feature to try launch with a limited feature set. Anything that was particularly unstable was the first to go, and then features that were only partially implemented and easily hidden.

Narrowing our focus to the essential site functions helped get us back on track.

A Released (if Flawed) Product

At 11:57pm, we had made our final commits, deployed the app, and HolaNeighbor was launched to many cheers from those still hanging around. Champagne was poured and there was much celebration... until someone tried to sign up and was promptly greeted by a Rails error. It turns out migrations had not been run and the database was not working. That was easily fixed, and we could call it a weekend.

Overall thoughts for day 3:

• Better communication between development and design team could have resulted in incorporation of the designs. The design team came up with some great looking concepts, but there just wasn't time to implement them.
• Overall, I had a great time - I learned some new coding tricks, made some new friends, and became a co-founder of a company. Not bad for 54 hours! I'll definitely do StartupWeekend again if it comes to the DC area.
• A special thanks to all those involved with Startup Weekend - the weekend was a major success!