You’ll basically be watching Twitterers react to the debates in real time–pretty amazing, if you ask me. It’s like watching a national conversation unfurl right in front of your eyes. Try it out tonight!

Here’s how I’d explain this class: come up with a business plan for a company in semester, then execute it. At the end of the semester, you should have the tools to actually do it. Yow!

The thought of (or idea of) entrepreneurship is really alluring. I think it’s the idea of creating something where there was nothing, starting and sustaining a great idea or product that could change the world (or something slightly less schnazzy, sure) seems so rewarding.

Of course, in class we only hear from the smiling guest lecturers who navigated shaky start-ups through uncertain waters and nailed crucial business decisions to accelerate earnings by 1000% margins. We always hear about the mythical serial entrepreneur, the quintessential American man or woman who by a mix of cunning insight, dogged perseverance and arbitrary market whims (e.g. sheer luck), see their dreams become reality.

We don’t always hear from the entrepreneur whose family life is strained because he always travels or stays late in the office. We don’t always hear from the men and women who burn through money on dud after dud.

I worked with my friend Dave at FAQLY, his social networking startup two years ago my sophomore year. Dave was way passionate about the network and its potential. I knew it took a toll on him. Most of his waking hours were spent dreaming (I like to think) of ideas. He didn’t sleep much. He had to play many roles, from visionary to manager to chauffeur (haha, hi Dave!).

Anyways, my point was that even though there was a high potential for failure and a ridiculously demanding workload, Dave persevered through it all. Two years later, Dave’s working on another project now (have you heard of gOS?). And I talk to him occasionally and he tells me that he’s still not sleeping much. I know he’s just as passionate.

I’m starting to suspect that the draw to start a company is less about the idea than it is about the feeling of creating. It’s elusive and fleeting but when you catch it, you’re energized to try some more.

Hsiu-Fan and I are still a bit hesitant to call Wejoinin anything more than a pet project. Could it be anything more? Who knows. We’re treading carefully on that idea as we carefully calibrate our expectations. It’s been kind of cool as I start applying what I learn from IEOR 190A to Wejoinin.

One thing’s for sure, though. I’m in it for love of the game. I’m there because I feel alive when I create. Whether that means I’m behind the terminal or on the field or whatever remains to be seen.

The problem: the page seemed to freeze when loading page content. The request would time out, leaving a half-loaded page sans content. I dug into the theme at first, trying to track down which function call could have barfed. I tracked it into the apply_filters() call in the the post.

Wordpress uses a filtering system to manage content. This lets us add filters over all kinds of content. I realize that the problem was stemming from the Text Control plugin, where something had barfed!

I disabled the plugin and voila! We were good to go again.

Since we only really used Textile markup on the CCF site, I just re-enabled the default Textile plugin and we were back in business.

I don’t know for the life of me what went wrong over the weekend in the Text Control plugin, but I don’t have the cajones or the time to dig through server logs, et. al. and find out.

Geeking out like nobody’s business,

–Andrew

I most definitely need at least several hours of computation time to get the results I need, but figured that I’d do best by dividing up the labor between CPUs. So last night I set five cores’ worth of computational power a-workin’–1 on my desktop, 2 on my laptop and 2 remote cores on Hsiu-Fan’s sweet desktop.

(Then I disconnected sometime last night from Hsiu-Fan’s computer, abruptly killing my processes. I’m back on using UNIX screen because I read I can remotely detach windows and processes, but I’m actually not sure if the process keeps chuggin’ in the case when your program spawns X windows and you’ve disconnected).

So humor me here, I feel pretty awesome right now. My room’s a bit warm with the sheer heat dissipation from my computers, but at least that negates the need for human companionship. Tally-ho!

— Edit: the joys of Python:

“Fanboy” says the Facebook engineer behind me, under his breath.

So we’re in CS lecture (this is with Prof. Papadmitrou), and one student in the front raises his hand and asks, “Isn’t the Traveling Salesman Problem not yet proven NP-complete?”

Papadmitrou turns around with a concerned expression on his face. “No, it is definitely NP-complete. What makes you think that?”

“Oh, I dunno. I just thought I heard you say it or read it somewhere.”

“It is most definitely NP-complete.” Papadmitrou talks for a few moments about why it is so. “I should know, I proved it in my thesis.” Then he follows it up with this smile.

Our jaws all drop. Everybody’s thinking the same thing: this man is a gangster. There is laughter and applause for a minute or two.

Well it turned out we didn’t have very much time. Today I opened up my email inbox to discover that Hack Day was today, and the actual time to hack was only from 2PM to 6PM.

So I head on over to the Woz with the intention of:

1. Eating free food
2. Grabbing a t-shirt or two
3. Talking to some of the Yahoo! devs
4. Giving a couple of hours as a freelance developer.

While I easily managed to achieve #1, 2 and 3, #4 (joining a random group) was something that I didn’t expect to do.

Hsiu-Fan showed up half-way through the competition and told me “Okay, I have 50 minutes. What do you want to do?” We had floated the idea of doing the Rhapsody scrobbler. “Okay,” he tells me. “I think I can do that in 50 minutes.”

But by then, I’ve been snagged by this other group, composed of folks mainly from the CS Undergrad Association. The idea? The creation of a commuter Web application that would take peoples’ commute details and sort them into carpools based on convenience.

The problem? These guys were serious Java heads. I was the lone Web developer. We were going to have problems. Fortunately we managed to hash out a somewhat working hack using the skill sets that we had.

Okay, it was a “hack” in every sense of the word. The other guys didn’t want to implement a database (which means no locking, no synchronization). I was parsing browser inputs through PHP and writing them out to a flat file. Then something got slurped by our Java backend and requests were shot back and forth between Yahoo! Maps and our service. Then the resulting routes were written out to a flat file and a PHP script consumed it on demand, displaying calculated routes.

My job? I was the frontend guy, interface guy, PHP guy, and client-side guy. I put together a pretty quick-and-dirty interface (see below) using YUI grids and reset. Then I did a pretty massive Frankenstein CSS job, piecing bits of code from the Blueprint CSS framework, previous projects and Wejoinin.

(Aside: If there’s one thing I appreciate about a CSS framework, it’s the flexibility and speed it affords you. I love, particularly with Blueprint (which I would have preferred to use on this project but didn’t because it is a Yahoo! Hack Day), the ability to lay out a grid-based layout using CSS selectors in a fraction of the time it takes you to build it again from scratch.)

Then I took a deep breath and summoned up enough of the PHP left in the recesses of my brain.

Oh yeah, Hsiu-Fan didn’t manage to finish the Scrobbler on time (50 minutes was pretty optimistic), but we’re looking into finishing it up sometime, somewhere else. And it will be cool and we will feel fuzzy.

Hack day lessons

• Come in with a cool idea with a cool team ready to execute. Don’t assemble something together last minute.
• Yahoo! cares more about people that are passionate than about people who have impressive resumes.
• Your project idea should be limited enough in scope to be polished.
• Even if your team strengths don’t align well, you’ll always find a way to do [your hack].
• Come on, Yahoo!, could we get a little more than 4 hours to finish?

All in all, a bunch of fun. I’d definitely do it again. And I’d pray that I’d have a little more time to execute. And hope that people don’t give me any more weird looks when I tell them I was at a “programming contest.”

– Edit:

Berkeley Hack Day happened Friday at a frenetic pace. We invaded the Woz in Soda Hall and students were trickling in and out all day with a core group of four hack teams staying for the duration and a couple of teams working remotely. The teams fought Java, Python, C++ and PHP all day long, with Java defeating at least a couple of team members with its multiple layers of input streams required just to pull in a simple text file. We also fought with RSS feeds from Craigslist, news archives and local Berkeley event listings.

In the end it was a very close race between two hacks that rose above the rest: an extremely useful carpool commuter application that matched up peoples’ addresses and their daily destinations and tried to organize the most efficient combination of carpools, and a magnificent hack that provided a cell phone interface to the old game of Twenty Questions. The impressive mix of technologies required to answer the call automatically, acquire the data for the twenty questions, do the text-to-speech translation and issue the FFT code to decipher the user responses from the cell phone won over the judges to take the top prize.

Berkeley University Hack Day Wrap-Up Yahoo Developer Network blog

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