24 magic hours to Search Spin

Ingredients: @dkris, @enginerd, @jerrymannel and @privarma and for dessert our @ujj

hour 1: Discuss the idea again, everybody convinced its going to be a serial killing app. Heard someone say snacks, off to get some. Back to the table. Back end design in progress. Dkris and Anand take up UI. Jerry, Priyanka and I are on algorithm and database.

hour 2: A simple workspace for search spin up and running, does nothing but serves as a platform for further development. Integrated Boss Mashup framework with GAE, so far so good.

hour 3: Stuck, bloody stuck in getting related keyterms for a searchusing BOSS. Bad bad documentation, no help for you and here comes @t3minator, a guy from yahoo who says he doesnt know BOSS, comes and spots a minor bug in our python function call and there we are. good to go. now we've got all we need from BOSS (never thought id say this about any BOSS)

hour 4: Coke and hot dog, FTW! and @daaku, @ashwin make their way in. Its going to be a long night. the valentine party's about to begin so we want to be done with the keyterms algorithm before then. Jerry's on it assiduously.

hour 5: Database implementation now in progress. Heres what I like and dislike about App Engine, makes it easy to create and manage the tables but its not relational, lot of the stuff you know, you have to un-know to survive here. Priyanka and I are on it, Anand joins in. Dkris is taking help from Chris on Yui.

hour 6 & 7: party time! dance performance by Shadow 1, couples dancing and wait! whats that? is it a monkey with one leg, is it a large chicken, no its Dhempe FTW! he's dancing! that has to be the funniest moment of my life. Thank you God for the food we eat and the stuff we see. Meanwhile some basic data entry/retrieval api's in progress. Btw theres one beer a person today.

hour 8 & 9: food! more food! and a round table conference with all the bangalore twitterati. Discussions generally around Dhempe and Dkris and how procoder always wanted to dance. Laughter is the best stress buster, the next hour passes away just like that.

hour 10: Now writing a simple javascript for showing search results and integrating with v1.0 of jerry's algorithm for keyword matching. Things getting to move ahead now. Now we can see something happening. not much but something.

hour 11: Coke and Red Bull keeping people up and working. Some people who had other people's beer too, fallen around wasted. Mediamama (m not n) AKA @narayananh next to our team's hack place and Dhempe goes and sleeps next to the stage that made him the man of the moment for 60 seconds. Those suckers!

hour 12: Testing out the basic features, a test url set up. Good habits coming in handy today. Spotted a major issue in the db queries, now fixing it, will take time, but better late than later.

hour 13: Out for a walk, its becoming gloomy, half of the room now sleeping. Its become very silent. Good time to get everything done. I want to have a fully functional UI-less version up and running in the next two hours. Everyone agrees, Anand and Jerry finalizing on the v 2 of the algorithm. Dkris working on UI and me and Priyanka on the backend.

hour 14 & 15: Coffee for some, coke for some, sleep for the rest. Found another issue with the database updates, we're all becoming slower now. Dkris is over and out. I am at my slowest best and cant think of a simple workaround. Advise from Jerry and Anand is to catch some sleep but Priyanka and I decide to keep going.

hour 16: Done! a simple UI version up which works the way we want it to. Few high fives and I decide to catch an hour of power nap. Priyanka decides to do a small code review, Anand and Jerry too get some sleep.

hour 17: woke up, did one round of testing. It is working! time to freshen up and get some breakfast! Another round table conference is in order! with discussions on some nice pics taken by the bangalore twitter group of people sleep-working.

hour 18: UI integration on with some slight optimizations on the algorithm. It all seems cool now. We've made it. Anand working on the final CSS and Priyanka and Jerry doing a final code review. Me and dkris having a chat with @Daaku, @narayananh and @Dhempe.

hour 19: Done, now final testing and submitting our app to the final list. We're no 13 on the list. The lucky 13. All done now, time to just hang around and help jerry prepare for the presentation.

hour 20-24: Fun and masti, another round of round table conference during lunch. This was the awesomest weekend of my life. Worked like an exploited dog and had a great time with the twitter group.

As soon as Jerry went for presentation, the bangalore twitter group screamed their intestines out. Everyone knew who the most popular team of the hack day was. It was grand! jerry wrapped the presentation in 88 seconds and it just couldnt be better.

We didnt win anything but after having worked for 24 hours, all we needed was a 12 hour sleep and nothing more. Some really cool apps were on demo and hope some from them makes it big. Do check out our app Search Spin.