swhyd

Life is not like guitar hero where you get to know before hand which string to pluck. You take steps, baby steps, sometimes go ahead. sometimes lateral, like a crab. You know not what is right. But, you attempt to keep moving, to see if you can reach a spot which makes you go like...wow!!!! The first week of September was a refreshingly new experience for me. It was the first start up weekend at hyderabad at ISB. The amazing campus and the towering architecture is bound to leave on mesmerized. Thanks to Kalyan in the first place, followed by the ever-persisting Pallav, we finally took the leap into ISB. We started by tagging ourselves with the colors provided for the different roles you could play. Developor, Designer, Business man and Jack of all trades. I took the developer color and moved to the food corner to stuff myself for a long night. The event started with an informative opening by Pankaj on the essence of the startup weekend and how one should go about pitching his idea. I was not really sure if I was going to head an idea as all I was interested was in coding a product soon. As discussed earlier in the day, Pallav pitched his plan for the Flat Finder followed by an app to measure the delta brightness after using a fairness cream. It seems people actually liked that idea. Few good ideas I felt were timeline based articles, easy 'restaurant-ing' through smart phones, the TV guide among others. People pitched and then took their places along the edge of the auditorium and we eventually had our own team. Pallav, me and Avinash. We came up with a basic framework that we planned to implement over the weekend to kick start our product. I started the development overnight and got to integrating with google maps API to show a map given a set of basic points(available houses). 4 hours of sleep later, I resumed work or attempted to, back in the auditorium, setting up the IDE and getting ready to resume android dev. It took forever to get everything set up and finally by 5pm I was back to where I stopped last night at home. With help from mentor Chaitanya and his developer, we had a simple php page with a save on click on map and by the night simple functionality of seeing added houses was completed. Leaving for the day at ~4?, took to the bed for another 5 hours and came back to resume work. With help from Chidambar, I finally got the map route shown although not using kml for the time being. Integrating with the Gmap API for android and using the Gmaps app, we could show a route between two houses. With this basic wireframe ready, we were planning to showcase the next step as a prototype. However, all hell broke loose when the resolution of the online presentation which was made impressively, could not match to the projector and we(read Pallav) ended up presenting without a presentation, just vocally. I guess that just left everything disappointing. I slipped out early to reach home, tired lost and sad. But still, determined to resume work and have a working prototype to showcase another day. If only I had the help of more developers, we could have everything functional in ~10 days. And so, I dream.