Hackathon

Yesterday was the big Hackathon at work. Ideas are pitched beforehand and then everyone forms groups and works on hacking out a rough version or proof of concept throughout the day. It was a lot of fun. I was worried I'd show off what an idiot I am (and that almost did happen!) but it ended up being a good time. My team was kinda small and we picked a project where a vendor could take before and after pics of the service. We started off doing it from scratch and we were gonna upload pics and everything. I thought I'd get to do back-end stuff but since I don't have acces to the platform we're using got hit with a website. Maybe technically easier but I'm rusty as fuck with that shit. I was having trouble even getting shit set up (but if I'd gotten the environment on my machine I don't think that would've been an issue). Anyway, Toby came by and suggested we use something like Instagram that already has most of the capabilities we could tap into so we changed tack. First there was the hurdle of linking two separate images and we tried different things and different social media platforms until we discovered this free app called PicStitch that makes putting two images together (and sharing them on a variety of platforms) super easy. So the made could use that and post directly to Instagram or email it to a centralized person to do that. We threw together some code to display it on a page using Instafeed. Barely any code at all. Mostly Feng did that (he was the other developer in the group), but there was collaboration. I mean, not even enough coding to run on more than one machine. Just one small page. Oh, I should also say we were named the Feng-tastic Four. I took a lot of "before and after" pics on my phone and tagged 'em and such and they got lots of laughs in our presentation. Go me being funny for once. Some of the other projects ended up being much more impressive than ours though they did have more developers on their teams. I was proud of where ours ended up, nice and simple as it was. So that was a long day, but good.

Okay, today I got in and fucking finally figured something out I'd not been able to do since starting! I've gotten my war files to deploy in Eclipse. I'd had everything else going. Building the files with maven in Eclipse. Running the server in Eclipse. But I just couldn't deploy and had to do that in the browser. Well, I finally figured out the setting to change and it's working! So I can do everything in Eclipse. Yay me. After work I picked back up my jogging. Sickness finally seems to have passed (it was never real bad, but I didn't wanna run outside while sick at all). It was real rough and my calves were rubber, but good to get back to it. Got a Chromecast in the mail today. Now we can watch hbo go on the tv! (Got a hookup through Ryan, currently have to watch on the ipad.) Other than that...