MatthewVB

Well, it’s come and gone in a rather quick fashion. I have plenty of thoughts to share for the upcoming days, but today I’m going to start with an overview of the weekend.

This weekend about 60+ people in DC meet up for DC Startup Weekend. Friday night we decided to launch a social network for communities about what’s going on in their neighborhood, HolaNeighbor. Friday night left many in the group frustrated over a lack of direction towards where HolaNeighbor could go. I was really nervous we’d have about 10 people on Saturday morning cranking out an unflushed vision.

Saturday morning came with a new excitement as development (myself included) start cranking out some basics of the site. About an hour in, we had a list of features that we knew wouldn’t happen with about 8 developers working for the next 30 hours-ish. A group of reps from each department met in the the Ku room (location of a possible break-off faction of people) to flush out what HolaNeighbor was and wasn’t. We came together post-ku and announced what you’ll find online.

Saturday afternoon and night was a big dev push. We got a tons of things done. By the end of the night we had tons of features in the works, but no continious functionality — this would be what Sunday would become. About 8pm we started having some serious wireless issues which kept bringing dev to a halt. Around 10pm we kicked everyone off the wireless so dev could have full reign. People started leaving and about 5 dev team members shut down the house around 12:45am.

Sunday morning brought a strong dev team together with a focus on what to do. By noon, we had some features flushed out and needed to start working on bringing everything together. As the day pushed on, we kept hearing “Do you have something for us?” to which we replied, “we will, but just need to focus right now.” By about 11pm we had things pretty functional, but then our login script crashed. It wasn’t until about 11:45 that we started committing our code to the common source.

Then, at about 11:57pm, we launched! It was amazing. Then at, 12:02, we crashed, which was even more amazing. The millions upon millions of page hits we must have received brought our server down like a fireball. Then at about 12:06 we were back online.

The weekend was amazing! Between Andrew Hyde, Micah, Rich, and Charlie from Startup Weekend, as well as Brian and Andy from Viget, and Will, I couldn’t have been more pleased. Look for an article in the post about the weekend — more info will come when that hits.

Next post topic: If I were a business owner, I’d be afraid of SW.