The evening of February 24, 2014, a friend and coworker invited me join his team to participate in the Launch Hackathon event over the weekend. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to greenfield an idea, work on it for 48 hours, and see where things go? We assembled for lunch on Friday and came up with an idea that fit the strengths of the team.
For us, it started as an attainable goal that filled a need we actually had; automated performance testing. The weekend was a roller coaster of emotions and we didn’t expect much more than fun out of it. By Sunday afternoon we were all really happy with what we had accomplished and agreed to make everything open source so that we could work on improving it in our spare time.
I think we were all a little surprised to wind up on stage presenting in the second round of judging. This put us in the top twelve teams among all participants of the event for the weekend. That alone was motivational and validated our efforts. We were entirely astounded to find ourselves not only in the top five, but in the number one spot for the judges competition. To top that off, we had won one of the sponsors competitions without really intending to do so.
Taking first place in the judges competition entitles us to some cash and prizes. Winning the sponsors competition meant some additional support from them to help the project grow. More importantly, being in the top five put us on track to give our pitch on Tuesday morning at the main stage of the Launch Festival event. It also gave us about thirty six hours to polish everything and launch our product to the public in a very big way.
Which bring us up to date. I’ve just gotten off the train and we’re meeting up to finalize everything before tomorrow. Time to get heads down and focus to really see where this thing goes.
