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🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
roma★
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
shark vs the universe
taylor price
blake kathryn
almost home
Cosmic Funnies
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
todays bird
oozey mess
YOU ARE THE REASON
occasionally subtle
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Jimmy Eat World
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
seen from United States
seen from Vietnam
seen from United Kingdom
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seen from Ecuador
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seen from United States
seen from Singapore
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seen from Russia
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@joeschindel-blog
Changing Scenery
One of the things I have discovered is best to spark my creativity is a change in scenery. Americans tend to forget that we are lucky to have a beautiful country we are free to travel. The biggest mistake we all make is not getting out of our comfort zone and exploring it.
So what are we waiting for? Lets go on an adventure.
How to become a better programmer
Program.
Now go, and solve the world's problems.
Week update
This past week has been pretty hectic with the 4th of July and work. I am getting a hang of the program I am working on and am looking forward to working more with it. (Dojo toolkit's documentation is horrible). I am also working on some side projects in web development and hopefully can share some of my progress soon.
I am trying out being vegan for a week. Not by wearing all vegan clothes and using vegan products but by eating vegan. I am 3 days in and I have not had any issues other than the craving for cheese.
There is another Startup Weekend in 3 weeks that I am considering going to but not unless more developers sign up. (http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3682392134) The Business and marketing tickets are almost sold out and they have only sold 7 developer tickets. Houston is also a bit of a drive but if I end up going it should be awesome.
Have a great week everyone.
Make sure to follow me on twitter @JO3_S or subscribe to my blog for updates
Startup Weekend: The winners
These are the teams that placed during Startup Weekend Dallas 6/22-24.
Third place went to a team called Boomerang Pass which is planning on integrating the iOS6 passbook into creating a way for small businesses to monetize the way in which they do frequent buyers. According to the judges they had a good looking landing page (they really did) and they had gone out and talked to small businesses in the area to get their opinion on this.
Second place went to a group that wanted to solve a problem that occurs when someone wants to ship out a mass amount of stuff but can’t, TinyShip (http://tinyship.co/). They were inspired by websites like Kickstarter that have lots of users that need to ship out lots of tshirts and various other things. They had a working prototype for sellers to use and a simple sign up form. Their idea impressed the judges because there is a need for a company that can help normal people ship large amounts of stuff. Their working demo also was a plus.
First place went to an app called “food truck tracker” which basically had an interface where food trucks could post where they will be. Even though this has been done before it won for three reasons. First of all they had a semi working mock up that demonstrated what it would look like. Also they spend Saturday going out to a food truck location and talked to the owners and customers. Finally they had a good presentation, clear, to the point and they impressed the judges.
My Thoughts:
One observation I had about all of the winning teams is there were three people on each. My team during Startup Weekend had six, could the size of our team held us back? Boomerang Pass is very forward thinking and I believe if they can execute can be very successful. TinyShip solves a problem that is oblivious but no one has done anything about it. If they can get the logistics in place they could have a success. I have seen a "food truck tracker" app done before but if they differentiate themselves enough they could have success in the Dallas area.
Make sure to follow me on twitter @JO3_S or subscribe to my blog for updates
500,000 lines and thoughts on internships
Recently at my internship I was moved from a testing team to a development team. I was excited to finally check out some code for the system I had been testing for three weeks. I was not prepared to experience 500,000+ lines of code. A huge program with a backend written in Java and a frontend coded in JavaScript and HTML. Developed over the past four years this well-oiled machine was overwhelming to me.
Prior to this the largest program I had ever worked on was about 15,000 lines and I was able to spend a semester working with a team of 8 to create it. I started to wonder how a student can prepare for something like this. How can I adjust to a new JavaScript toolkit, development environment and code in just 10 weeks?
What I am learning is in my 10 weeks at the company I am not going to program lifesaving tools. I probably won’t even have accomplished something major like create a new feature to this project. Internships are a test run, both for the intern and the company. I have been getting exposure to various elements of the business that I am a part of. Companies need interns for fresh perspectives and new ideas, this is what drives innovation. Companies hope that your experience during a summer will lead to a new full time employee.
Hopefully I will have the opportunity to become a full time employee somewhere awesome after I graduate.
Make sure to follow me on twitter @JO3_S or subscribe to my blog for updates
Startup Weekend (SW) Advice for Saturday
Coffee and lots of caffeine. To get a lot of work done make sure you have the right drinks to get you through. The food at the SW was awesome and I munched on food all day.
Validate your product. Call people, post online surveys or even go out in talk to people. Chances are there is a mall or public place nearby. You will need this validation to confirm that people will actually use whatever you are developing. Try to even sell your product to someone, the judges will love that.
Begin your business plan. There are plenty of free tools online that I will go over in a later post but use them. You need a pricing structure and how you plan to grow and scale. You still have Sunday morning and afternoon to finish this.
Stay the course. At the SW I attended Saturday was the day when we had one of the teams quit. Don’t give up and focus on finishing the weekend
Startup Weekend. Saturday, the 20 hour work day
A recap of my Saturday at Startup Weekend (SW)
I woke up at 7:30am and showered before one of the longest days of continuous work I ever have had. We got to the venue at 8ish and there was awesome breakfast with magical burritos, I ate two. We continued to brainstorm and a name was picked for the application. “BuzzMenu”, combining a notification system to replace the annoying physical buzzers. Also feature where people who are waiting can view the menu and specials from their phone.
I finally was able to begin coding and creating a website. I decided to use Foundation by Zurb because I was using it on a side project of mine and thought it would be good to get more experience with it. It did not take me long to have a rough design together so I started to work with the designer on how the logo would look. I then had another breakfast burrito.
I had a landing page up by around 12 but setting up an email sign up was a pain. I tried to just have it send to a Google doc but the folks at Google must have changed their system because you can’t redirect to a different confirmation page. So after about an hour our mentor told me to check out MailChimp and I was able to get a form up quick. Two more burritos for a late afternoon snack.
Once the landing page was up and running I began to work on the applications web page. I wanted to show the application with screenshots on an ipad and an iphone so I grabbed some pictures from offline. I worked basically from scratch using Foundation to create the website. I had two breakfast burritos that I brought home around 3. I was up until about 5am working on various things and finally crashed and went to bed.
Make sure to follow me on twitter @JO3_S or subscribe to my blog for updates
Startup Weekend (SW) Friday night recap
A recap of the first night from my perspective.
Walking into the room with all of the Startup Weekend participants is somewhat overwhelming. There is such a diverse group of people with different skill sets and experiences. After receiving a name tag it is a free-for-all for the pizza and then everyone sits and "networks." I was pretty exhausted from work and did not talk to as many people as I wish I would have.
Once the event got going we heard from the MC, Brad Anderson, who has done entrepreneurship education and is working on his own startup. The two speakers were good to hear from to get the perspective of someone who is working in startups that began at SWDFW in the past(Bradley Joyce). Also hearing by someone who quit their day job to pursue a career in his own company (Chris Yates).
Once the pitches started there were two main themes that a lot of pitches had; Crowdsourcing and “this is kinda like Groupon but not.” There were some pretty interesting ideas, some seemed crazy and some were reasonable. My pitch sucked, no harm done though, I focused on finding the right project for me. I wish I would have taken notes because that would have helped me a lot when it was time to pick.
I decided to work on a project that was an app for usage in bars to ‘cut the line,’ and get your drinks faster. I seemed to click with the guy who pitched the app and my friend Bruce who I came there was going to create the iPhone app. We had five members on our team and a sixth who was one of the mentors. We began brainstorming and talked for most of Friday night about features for the app.
It took till 11:45pm on Friday night to come up with a clear idea and it was a complete shift from a bar app. We were going to create an app that replaced the buzzers that a restaurant uses with a text and push notifications. We gave ourselves a homework assignment to think of a name and left at 12:00 because the venue closed. I was in bed by 2:00am because I knew Saturday would be a long day
Make sure to follow me on twitter @JO3_S or subscribe to my blog for updates
Startup Weekend (SW) Advice for the first night if you are new.
Advice for the first day of Startup Weekend
Talk to people, right away. Everyone at SW wants to be there. Each person has to pitch and it is good to meet them before they pitch. It is good to find people that you click with, you potentially could be working with them for the next 54 hours. Remember what people specialize in, if it fits with what you have in mind let them know to look for you during the pitch time. Networking is your friend.
The Pitch. I can speak from experience of how NOT to do the pitch. I volunteered to go first, which was strike #1. If it is your first SW watch other people go first and make sure you cover all of the points. Strike #2 was that I forgot to say what type of people I needed for my project. You will need business minded people, designers and developers of some sort. Without saying what you need people will not be interested in joining you. Strike #3 was the execution of the pitch itself. I won’t go into detail on what I pitched but basically I wanted to create a website where people who are pissed off can vent directly to the people they are pissed off at. I did not deliver the pitch in a way that corresponded to the idea that I was pitching. I was told after the selection process that I seemed too happy and people were not sold by my pitch. Be Clear, Passionate and Concise. You only have 60 seconds, make them count.
Watching other pitches. This is simple, bring a pad of paper and take notes. If you don’t write down the ideas that are presented you will have a tough time voting and picking which idea you want to work with. Notes, notes, notes.
Selecting your favorite three. If you pitched an idea the only way you will get it to become a project is to commit one or two of your sticky notes to your own project. If you don't vote for your own no one will. Also stand by your project and go into more detail with other people. This is when you need to find the people who you will work will for the rest of the weekend. The way I used my post-its was on ideas that solved a problem, not an inconvenience. Two of the three that I voted for moved on. This should be a fun time to talk with people and get a feel for peoples passions. If the person who pitched it has no passion it will fail.
Dealing with rejection SW is the best place to get a good slap in the face of rejection. I messed up my pitch and had not put much effort into selling what I presented. I did not stand by what I pitched and no one voted for it. Not even myself; my vote was better off elsewhere. But the best thing about SW is that it is a learning experience. I learned what NOT to do and next time I will do better. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" -Kelly Clarkson
Finding or forming a team The process of team building is the most important part of the night. Designers are always the hottest commodity and can basically pick whatever project they want. This means if you are in need of a designer get one quick, sell them your idea, show them your passion. I would consider Developers the second highest in demand, if you are a developer find a project that a business person pitched and talk to them about what you can bring to the table. I used the demand to my advantage and let each person try and sell me their idea before I decided on which team to go with. Finally for business people there is less of a demand but they are the most vital parts to a team. Someone has to validate the product and do research, let them know you understand their idea and are ready to help out. You will spend the next 50ish hours working very close with these people, make sure you click and potentially could work well.
Make sure to follow me on twitter @JO3_S or subscribe to my blog for updates
Startup Weekend Hangover
Wow. Startup Weekend was a marathon and a sprint at the same time. 5:30am is really early when you didn’t sleep much during the weekend. I have started to write posts about my experience at Startup Weekend Dallas and I hope to post them during this week.
Good morning world and have a great week.
Startup Weekend
This Friday, Saturday and Sunday I will be participating in my first Startup Weekend! I am really excited and looking forward to meeting some awesome people. If you are not familiar with Startup Weekend please check out their website here.
The business side of me is really excited for the pitch I am trying to think of a great idea to present to the group. Giving the pitch will be good experience for me, I just need to focus on one idea and nail down what I will say. Trying to think of some great attention grabbers I decided the easiest way is to wear something unique. I am deciding between wearing a Stanford shirt (so they think I am some sort of genius) or a shirt with the face of a cat (who doesn’t like cats??). Even if the idea I pitch does not get selected I know that I will have a great time at Startup Weekend.
Follow me on twitter @JO3_S or subscribe to my blog
I have no idea what I am doing.
Bloggers have always been people that I admired. Not people who consider posting pictures and .gif animations blogging, but the people who take time to share their thoughts and opinions. Personally I feel inadequate. I have no online writing experience and no clue what I am doing, why not give it a go? It could be the hot Texas heat or long days at work with minimal human contact, but I am going to commit to writing frequently here. I am a “learn by doing” type of person so here I am doing.
So bear with me as I begin this journey of blogging.
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