trendpreneur

Thanks to Google Chrome (ahem, yay!) I recently got complimentary wi-fi on my Virgin flight from New York back to San Francisco. (I’ll deconstruct the Virgin experience later — in a nutshell, this Easyjet regular was very impressed).

Of course, I did what any sane person would do and checked into my flight at 35,000ft via Foursquare – and instantly got a slew of completely random @-mentions on Twitter from people around the world begging me to check in for them so they could unlock the badge too.

Is getting a Foursquare badge so important, or is there some hack going on here? There are tons of badges I know I’m never going to get, so why the fuss over this one?

Here’s my quick take on The Social Network, a film that I enjoyed and would be quite happy to watch again, even through the cringeworthy parts.

(No spoilers, don’t worry.)

As far as I can see, the Internets are split into two camps. Love it for the drama, hate it for the portrayal of Silicon Valley and/or geeks. Now, since I’m a geek living in Silicon Valley, why am I not in the latter camp? Because I’ve been outside the bubble and think that the film has a key message for people who aren’t enmeshed in this microcosm.

You can build something cool and be inordinately successful.

Valley people are probably wondering why something so obvious even needs to be said. But what about the college kids, the teenagers, even the children trying to figure out what programming is all about, why technology is awesome, what makes websites tick, and how business actually works? (Not once do I remember being formally educated on “business”, i.e. the simple concept: create or buy something, and sell it for more than it cost you. Next stop: lawsuits, patents, VCs, boards, employees and taxes.)

Telling people around the world, in countries and cities where there isn’t a wealth of successful tech entrepreneurs, of people who stayed up all night giving birth to an idea, of people who can make things happen by pushing pixels and electrons around — telling these people that as an undergrad at university you can knock something up that, in time, leads to a movie about you being made, you’re so successful — is needed, and I’m extremely glad to see it.

The stuff around the edges could be improved, of course. Is the meta plot offputting to wannabe startups? I don’t know. It doesn’t put me off — man, I envy people who can be sued for $65 million, that means they have $65 million to spare!

I’m writing this, sleep deprived, the infamous morning after. I like to plan things, and so here’s a few ideas – mostly for my own reference, but posted on the Internets because someone else may find them useful – on how to make the most of an overnight (or all-weekend) hackathon.

This list is by no means exhaustive or sane.

You will need…

First of all, and this sounds obvious, but prepare for the event itself.

• How to get to venue
• Nearby food stores
• Nearby open-late stores
• Cheap hotels nearby (or easily accessible)
• Anything else of interest nearby
• Special things – 3 nights? Specific language? Big prizes?
• Previous events by the same people – blogs, photos etc.

Physical preparation:

• Layers. All night in a building can get cold (or hot, if they turn the AC off..). Extra layers can double up as a subtle change of clothes.
• At the minimum, spare pants, some kind of deodorant and a toothbrush. If you’re feeling extra prepared a full change of clothes and hotel bag…
• Advil/Nurofen. Hand cream, face wipes, etc can all help.
• Sleeping bag, Snuggie, pillow (doubles up as cushion or vice versa), throw/blanket, airbed, mat, cot, etc. Staying up the whole time is fine, but getting forty winks is better.

Technical preparation – the rucksack:

• Laptop and charger, of course.
• Projector adapter if needed. Bring spares.
• Phone and cable, ideally tetherable (=alarm clock).
• Headphones.
• Other gadgets, hardware hacks, music players, etc.
• Power extension lead (people will love you).
• Some scrap paper, pens, Sharpies, whiteboard markers, portable whiteboard or flip chart (why not), post-its, etc. Depending how much you usually work with stationery and how much is often provided.
• Business cards.
• External mouse, keyboard, monitor, entire PC, chair …

Technical preparation – software:

• Linode or equivalent with dedicated account set up unless you’re actually organised
• Domain registrar you’re familiar with
• Github repo (version control is very, very crucial)
• Your stack of choice installed locally and/or remotely
• Previous code you’ve written to base off quicklyse
• iOS, Android SDKs installed (you won’t be able to download them on the hackathon wifi)
• Wiki or other temp workspace already setup
• Standard tools you likely have already: IRC, twitter, decent text editor, image editor, lightweight web browser

Mental preparation

• List, wiki, or other collection of ideas
• Spend some time thinking about the specific hackathon and an idea that you could tailor to it
• Think of a technology or platform you want to dive into, learn more about or become more expert in
• Know what the end goal is – a 60 second pitch? Working demo? 5 slide PPT? Work backwards.
• Who’s judging? What’ll impress them? What are most pitches at these events usually like and how can you stand out?
• Practice coding late at night (you probably do;)) and mundane tasks such as git management until you can literally do them in your sleep.
• If you have an idea you really want to develop, think a little about it beforehand, but not too much. Who do you need to build it with? Why are you at the hackathon?

Overall, you can absolutely just turn up with a laptop and charger and nothing else, but (especially as I get closer to 30) the idea of arriving at a hackathon in a RV becomes more and more appealing. Sleep is your friend, it allows your brain to recharge and renew, and even if sleeping on the floor of a conference centre isn’t the most appealing thing in the world now, at 4am it will be.

Suggestions? What are your favourite items to bring?

Whew.

I’ve spent most of the last 24 hours learning Node.js and building an elegant asynchronous app to gauge audience feedback during startup pitches. (Try as I might, I always keep coming back to opinion mining…)

The demo link is somewhat rigged, but the overall design is pleasing; I was a Node sceptic (mostly because I tend to be slightly sceptical of anything that’s so obviously du jour), but in this case, it’s a kind of refreshing brain twist.

Our app was designed around messages and pings, and as I had to learn the entire platform and framework and concepts in a few hours, I leaned heavily on existing work: Express is pretty awesome, and there are a zillion templating languages (I used EJS due to my familiarity with ugly HTML-embedded statements, but I looked at Jade briefly and it looks cool too). jQuery for the frontend, of course, and HTML5; dived into touch technologies and the Sencha framework, but time and attention were getting short by then.

One of the core things I used was socket.io, which I was very impressed by. Basically, it Just Works (with a slight hiccup that the npm version was dubious and being sniffy about WebKit, but hey).

I was pretty impressed by the level of beginner-friendly documentation out there (the advantage of coming in on a fairly new technology?) but some of it was already out of date and some of it was just plain missing. Still, once I got my head around the core concepts it was mostly straightforward, with the sort of hiccups you’d expect from sleep deprivation and install woes. (I still don’t quite get why passing objects between sockets isn’t working for me…)

In my copious spare time I may write up and open source the code – we had a nifty database stack as well as a beautiful message based voting and analytics system! – but really the core lesson is this – you can learn anything in a day if you set your mind to it, regardless of how faddy it is.