Anders Conbere

So I was really thinking about it tonight, and SixHourStartup really needs a home. This isn't a particularly difficult thing to bring about and a lot of the tools already exist. We need a blog to keep people up to date on what's going on, next meetings, and generally a place for the community to talk. We need a project management system to keep track of commits, files bugs, and organize our development around. We need a wiki to keep new ideas in order. We need a calendar to plan releases.

And I think most of this is already out there and available.

Blogs software is a dime a dozen, trac can do wiki and svn integration, so we could probably use some calendar integration and that's about it! So I might start putting this stuff together tonight, it looks like someone already bought sixhourstartup.com, so if that's one of us, let's work on this.

Last Saturday we did another 6 hour startup, this time the goal was to create a game trading site that used the xmpp as the backend for storing data about who you're friends are. This was probably a little too ambitious and the result is at gamewrangle.com. We had a distinct lack of designers present and it shows. That being said we actually accomplished a good deal of work, I think everyone was pretty pumped about the project and it "works".

The basic idea is pretty simple.

1. you're a gamer, you have games you don't play anymore, there are games you haven't played and want to.
2. you have friends who are gamers as well in the same situation.
3. these friends are in your messenger buddy list
4. by alerting you to the existence of who has and wants what, we can facilitate trading games between you and your friends.

The mechanism is simple, just add a list of the games you are willing to trade, and a list of games you want, and we go and find the "matches".

The business plan involves using the rich data from game entry to display targeted advertising or amazon referral links.

I learned a couple of key things, mostly regarding the use of my own jabber libraries, and how important it will be to get the jabber devs to understand how powerful an authorization workflow would be.

Last Saturday I took part in an event called SaturdayHouse where a group of people get together at someone's house to collaborate, share ideas, think, read and in general share in the company of others. This Saturday a friend of mine Brian Dorsey of NoonHat fame, suggested that we attempt to take that time to go from idea to production on a single idea, limiting ourselves to 6 hours.

The idea was simple, create a website that let people put in a username, have the app go crawl various sites looking for them and check what the tags are and if it has a tag "remind:YYYY-MM-DD" then remind them about that item when the date comes up. The Technology choices were made by Brian, we would be using Django (HURAH) the python web framework and Python. The result of this six hour code jam is TagMindr, "Put any bookmark in a time capsule and we'll send it to your future self.".

The way it works right now is it crawls your feeds on del.icio.us and magnolia based on the tag "tagmindr" and then does a second search for any items with the tag "remind:YYYY-MM-DD". And it works! Also the design we came up with has proven to be quite flexible and adding in Magnolia and Flickr support only took a few minutes (so if you think of any other sites that allow tagging like this tell me!).

In all the event was fantastic, I met a ton of great people, and actually got to work with them on a project that is live right now. Discussion has continued and people are still committing changes to the svn repository. So I have high hopes for what can come of this, more events like it, more collaboration, more ideas brought to life.