5 ms·

I was the worst coder in the room...

188 points by andreipop 14y ago

tokenizer 14y ago
Great article. I really enjoyed how they solved a problem that came up during brainstorming. I think that the easiest way to find a problem to solve is to be picky with reality. Question everything you or someone you're with is going through, that either takes a little more time, or a little more effort than you think. And you might not think it would unless you question reality more. Congrats to the team for going into this competition with the edge case mentality. I didn't see any details of their work in the posting, but it be interesting if we could all discuss physical locks with virtual keys some more. Cheers
tantalor 14y ago
The hack reminds me of "How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button", http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/18/how-facebook-hacked-the-nasdaq-button/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/18/how-facebook-hacked-the-nas...
nickbarnwell 14y ago
Any chance you have screenshots/a public repo of the app? Would love to take a look, as judging by the logo the design was nice indeed :) Congratulations on winning the Hackathon! Did you participate in the December Finals in Palo Alto and this blogpost is just many months late, or have they started a new round competition? If it's the former, I believe we've met (I was on the UW team), if it's the latter, best of luck! My experience at the Facebook Hackathon was very similar - I was the only Freshman to enter, our team had been cobbled together entirely by chance (2/4 were found by posting on reddit). We were some of the last to demo, and every one that preceded us seemed, at least to me, far more technically impressive. People had built real time games, written web-servers, designed Android apps to handle streaming video, but (almost) no one had a use-case. We essentially strung together API on top of API in some of the most hacky code I've ever written[1], and somehow it all came together in the end to a) work for the demo and b) seem like something people would actually use. Our idea for the final round was far more derivative and banal, and we lost because of it. [1] https://github.com/nickbarnwell/SpunBy.Me https://github.com/nickbarnwell/SpunBy.Me
- xxbondsxx 14y ago
  I was at the finals with you! Funny how long ago that was :P Also, I'm surprised that most of the students at the finals didn't interview with Facebook. You'd think that a company centered around the hack culture would be an attractive place to work...
  - nickbarnwell 14y ago
    Seems like ages, doesn't it? Did you end up getting a position with a company down in the Bay Area for the summer? I'll be at Google and would love to meet up with some of the people from the competition again, there was certainly no lack of good conversation :) I think we all got interviews at Addepar out of it, and one of the members from the team that had the book-reselling app ended up taking a position at Instagram shortly after, so I suppose he's working at FB in the end ;) The follow-up was interesting though, in that there was virtually none. The whole thing was very anti-climatic, really. Still very grateful for the experience, and I'm certainly not sad to have it on the ol' resume. You planning to try again next round?
- andreipop 14y ago
  Thanks! An incomplete version of the code seems to be up at: https://github.com/andreimpop/Locksmasher https://github.com/andreimpop/Locksmasher - I can't find the final version at the moment. We are in the finals in the fall - cool to hear about other people's experiences and what worked and what didn't. Not really looking for a job at Facebook at the moment since I'm working hard on Runnr.me, but I'm excited to meet some of the other teams and people, hoping to move down to Menlo / Mountain View full time soon.
conductr 14y ago
Glad you wrote this. I am going on 15 years of being self taught and constantly trying to learn more. I've built a whole lot in that time, but nothing has ever seen the light of day and I've never* done anything with it professionally. After much hesitation, I recently pulled the trigger and signed up for an upcoming Startup Weekend event. The hesitation comes from the thought that I will be light-years behind everyone else there, and basically won't be able to contribute at their level. This give me some confidence that I won't be a total drag on some team. * OK not entirely true - I'm in finance, and I do quite a bit with Excel VBA - but I don't really count that as real programming, although it has served me well in my field
- andreipop 14y ago
  Glad you enjoyed it, thanks for reading. I've always found most people at hackathons seem to be super friendly and willing to help out. The last hackathon I was at (Mozilla YVR) there were a few people there just writing HTML and CSS and tagging along on other projects learning and helping out. It's just an awesome community. Best of luck with Startup Weekend.
fleitz 14y ago
It's possible to build successful businesses by being able to put cheese, tomato sauce and pepperoni on dough and put it in an oven. I'm not sure why people think they have to be the smartest person in the room to build a business.
- run4yourlives 14y ago
  Sombody give this guy an Upvote for me, my fat thumbs on my iPhone hit the wrong arrow. Sorry bud.
  - dsrguru 14y ago
    Just did, and I'm mentioning that here so the OP won't get multiple correction votes. :) Nevertheless, I don't really agree with fleitz. Haphazardly throwing cheese, sauce, and pepperoni together on dough never makes good pizza (in my not so unbiased opinion as a New Yorker). While good pizza recipes obviously require trial and error to get there, they need to be built on a foundation of deep understanding. See http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm to get a feel for how difficult it actually is to make good pizza. You can have a successful business without a great product if your location and marketing are good, but I would not be happy running a successful software business that didn't sell good software. So I'm focusing this post on the quality of the business's product, not on how much revenue it makes. While you don't have to be the smartest person in the room to build a great product, you would need to be a great founder and be very good at surrounding yourself with smart people and knowing how to make them operate at their smartest, knowing which suggestions to follow, etc. Average founders almost never luck out completely (and stay successful) and in the specific case of pizza, the New Yorker in me doesn't believe that's possible. :) That being said, the original OP (I know that seems redundant) was talking about the person with the fewest specific skills, not the least intelligent. Most great founders probably have intelligence or skills, if not both.
    - icebraining 14y ago
      I think Telepizza[1] proves you can build a very successful pizza business/chain making terrible pizzas. I mean, they're worse than Pizza Hut, which doesn't exactly make a great pizza itself. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepizza http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepizza
mehulkar 14y ago
An upvote wasn't enough for me, wanted to just say that this was an awesome post.
- andreipop 14y ago
  Thanks mehulkar, glad you enjoyed it
EternalFury 14y ago
In this world, where 90% of new start-ups seem to be born out of an exclusive love for a technology or another, it's refreshing to read someone who believes the tools are just...tools, designed to serve a greater purpose. Now I can continue laughing at those outfits that believe their business success is a matter of arranging Ruby, Python, Clojure, CoffeeScript, JavaScript, Scala and other technologies in some semi-magical combination. And I can return to my review of the state of Ruby on Rails, where, nearly 5 years after Zed Shaw' "Rails is a Ghetto", it's still awfully difficult to install a single open source Rails-based app that doesn't lead you to dependency and packaging Hell.

188 points by andreipop 14y ago

Great article. I really enjoyed how they solved a problem that came up during brainstorming. I think that the easiest way to find a problem to solve is to be picky with reality. Question everything you or someone you're with is going through, that either takes a little more time, or a little more effort than you think. And you might not think it would unless you question reality more. Congrats to the team for going into this competition with the edge case mentality. I didn't see any details of their work in the posting, but it be interesting if we could all discuss physical locks with virtual keys some more. Cheers

tantalor 14y ago

The hack reminds me of "How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button", http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/18/how-facebook-hacked-the-nasdaq-button/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/18/how-facebook-hacked-the-nas...

nickbarnwell 14y ago

Any chance you have screenshots/a public repo of the app? Would love to take a look, as judging by the logo the design was nice indeed :) Congratulations on winning the Hackathon! Did you participate in the December Finals in Palo Alto and this blogpost is just many months late, or have they started a new round competition? If it's the former, I believe we've met (I was on the UW team), if it's the latter, best of luck! My experience at the Facebook Hackathon was very similar - I was the only Freshman to enter, our team had been cobbled together entirely by chance (2/4 were found by posting on reddit). We were some of the last to demo, and every one that preceded us seemed, at least to me, far more technically impressive. People had built real time games, written web-servers, designed Android apps to handle streaming video, but (almost) no one had a use-case. We essentially strung together API on top of API in some of the most hacky code I've ever written[1], and somehow it all came together in the end to a) work for the demo and b) seem like something people would actually use. Our idea for the final round was far more derivative and banal, and we lost because of it. [1] https://github.com/nickbarnwell/SpunBy.Me https://github.com/nickbarnwell/SpunBy.Me

xxbondsxx 14y ago
I was at the finals with you! Funny how long ago that was :P Also, I'm surprised that most of the students at the finals didn't interview with Facebook. You'd think that a company centered around the hack culture would be an attractive place to work...
- nickbarnwell 14y ago
  Seems like ages, doesn't it? Did you end up getting a position with a company down in the Bay Area for the summer? I'll be at Google and would love to meet up with some of the people from the competition again, there was certainly no lack of good conversation :) I think we all got interviews at Addepar out of it, and one of the members from the team that had the book-reselling app ended up taking a position at Instagram shortly after, so I suppose he's working at FB in the end ;) The follow-up was interesting though, in that there was virtually none. The whole thing was very anti-climatic, really. Still very grateful for the experience, and I'm certainly not sad to have it on the ol' resume. You planning to try again next round?
andreipop 14y ago
Thanks! An incomplete version of the code seems to be up at: https://github.com/andreimpop/Locksmasher https://github.com/andreimpop/Locksmasher - I can't find the final version at the moment. We are in the finals in the fall - cool to hear about other people's experiences and what worked and what didn't. Not really looking for a job at Facebook at the moment since I'm working hard on Runnr.me, but I'm excited to meet some of the other teams and people, hoping to move down to Menlo / Mountain View full time soon.

conductr 14y ago

Glad you wrote this. I am going on 15 years of being self taught and constantly trying to learn more. I've built a whole lot in that time, but nothing has ever seen the light of day and I've never* done anything with it professionally. After much hesitation, I recently pulled the trigger and signed up for an upcoming Startup Weekend event. The hesitation comes from the thought that I will be light-years behind everyone else there, and basically won't be able to contribute at their level. This give me some confidence that I won't be a total drag on some team. * OK not entirely true - I'm in finance, and I do quite a bit with Excel VBA - but I don't really count that as real programming, although it has served me well in my field

andreipop 14y ago
Glad you enjoyed it, thanks for reading. I've always found most people at hackathons seem to be super friendly and willing to help out. The last hackathon I was at (Mozilla YVR) there were a few people there just writing HTML and CSS and tagging along on other projects learning and helping out. It's just an awesome community. Best of luck with Startup Weekend.

fleitz 14y ago

It's possible to build successful businesses by being able to put cheese, tomato sauce and pepperoni on dough and put it in an oven. I'm not sure why people think they have to be the smartest person in the room to build a business.

run4yourlives 14y ago
Sombody give this guy an Upvote for me, my fat thumbs on my iPhone hit the wrong arrow. Sorry bud.
- dsrguru 14y ago
  Just did, and I'm mentioning that here so the OP won't get multiple correction votes. :) Nevertheless, I don't really agree with fleitz. Haphazardly throwing cheese, sauce, and pepperoni together on dough never makes good pizza (in my not so unbiased opinion as a New Yorker). While good pizza recipes obviously require trial and error to get there, they need to be built on a foundation of deep understanding. See http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm to get a feel for how difficult it actually is to make good pizza. You can have a successful business without a great product if your location and marketing are good, but I would not be happy running a successful software business that didn't sell good software. So I'm focusing this post on the quality of the business's product, not on how much revenue it makes. While you don't have to be the smartest person in the room to build a great product, you would need to be a great founder and be very good at surrounding yourself with smart people and knowing how to make them operate at their smartest, knowing which suggestions to follow, etc. Average founders almost never luck out completely (and stay successful) and in the specific case of pizza, the New Yorker in me doesn't believe that's possible. :) That being said, the original OP (I know that seems redundant) was talking about the person with the fewest specific skills, not the least intelligent. Most great founders probably have intelligence or skills, if not both.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    I think Telepizza[1] proves you can build a very successful pizza business/chain making terrible pizzas. I mean, they're worse than Pizza Hut, which doesn't exactly make a great pizza itself. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepizza http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepizza

mehulkar 14y ago

An upvote wasn't enough for me, wanted to just say that this was an awesome post.

andreipop 14y ago
Thanks mehulkar, glad you enjoyed it

EternalFury 14y ago

In this world, where 90% of new start-ups seem to be born out of an exclusive love for a technology or another, it's refreshing to read someone who believes the tools are just...tools, designed to serve a greater purpose. Now I can continue laughing at those outfits that believe their business success is a matter of arranging Ruby, Python, Clojure, CoffeeScript, JavaScript, Scala and other technologies in some semi-magical combination. And I can return to my review of the state of Ruby on Rails, where, nearly 5 years after Zed Shaw' "Rails is a Ghetto", it's still awfully difficult to install a single open source Rails-based app that doesn't lead you to dependency and packaging Hell.