Builders Weekend – My first Hackathon

O boy! Did we have fun this week! The Starter League organized Builders Weekend, a weekend hackathon. A hackathon is really an event where a bunch of people come together to try and create some sort of product, usually software or web based app, in teams in a pre-defined time period.

This gives you a change to learn and stretch yourself, by working with other people on a tight deadline to create a completed product. So on Friday night we started around 18:00. Everybody had a chance to pitch an idea, once all the ideas were presented, we could vote for our two favourite ideas.

Picture of the iLostandFound team building the app

The iLostandFound team working hard at Builders Weekend

The 4 ideas with the most votes were built. I joined a team building iLost&Found. iLost&Found is an online service that connects your contact details to a qrcode. You can have try it here: iLost&Found.

We had until Sunday 1400 to work on the app. Each team then had the chance to present their app to everybody including a panel of judges, who would pick a winning team.

Home page for iLostandFound – Our app from Builders Weekend

It was great fun. I even managed to work through the night Saturday and only got to bed Sunday morning around 0800. Something I have not done in a while. We learned a bunch of great lessons this weekend. Here are my three takeaways:

1) Working on code other people wrote is much harder than building the whole app on your own. It gave me a new appreciation for writing comments and making sure the code is easy to read.

2) Managing a code base with multiple contributors is tricky. We did not know enough about using github to make this easier so ended up spending loads of time redoing code that was ‘lost’.

3) Scoping is VERY important. Seems like you almost always try and do more than what is possible with the time and resources at your disposal. But since in event like this those are fixed, the only thing left to adjust is how much you can achieve.

Found page - from iLostandFound build during Builders Weekend

The page you will see after scanning a qrcode from iLostandFound

Mobile version

All four teams did really well and progressed nicely with building apps. All the presentations were awesome. It is actually amazing to see the skills we’ve all learnt over the last 8 weeks being applied, to build working apps in only a weekend.

It was great spending the weekend learning and working in a team, as an added bonus the iLost&Found team was declared the winners. I look forward to doing something like this again.

US don’t want me to Pay Tax

President Obama has made immigration reform one of his top priorities. I don’t know a lot about it, but I’m intrigued by stories about founders of tech businesses having run-ins with immigration.

Over the last few days Nate (also a student at Starter League) and I have been chatting about it. So I want to paint a hypothetical situation that illustrates one of the many problems with US immigration policy.

Nate and I spoke a lot about Immigration while in Detroit. Here is the GM head quarters in Detroit.

Let’s say you are a foreign national that has some technical, UX or design skills. You have read books like 4-Hour Workweek and The $100 Startup, and you finally decide to take the plunge and start your own business. After struggling to get clients in the beginning, you start to earn a steady income after 6 months.

Your customers give you glowing recommendations and as your portfolio grows, you get even more business. You do work for customers from all over the world. Where you are doesn’t matter and your clients don’t care – because you deliver.

With added mobility you could spend much of your life in the mountains.

Always wanting to travel and see the world, you decide to utilize your newfound mobility and take an RV trip through the US. But since you would also like to go skiing in Canada, you get a Canadian visa as well.

Just before you go, you decide to incorporate a company so business affairs can be completely separated from your personal affairs. Since most of your customers are based in the US, you decide to incorporate in Delaware.

So now you own a US-based company, which services customers from all over the world, including the US. But since you are not a US citizen and don’t have a green card, you can’t pay personal tax in the US. This means you have to be employed by your US company and pay tax in your native country.

After that is all set up, you start traveling. Both the US and Canada grant you a 6-month stay, so you could spend 6 months traveling the US in the summer and 6 months skiing in Canada. All 100% legal; as you continue to service your customers the company pays your salary back to your native country.

The sun setting over Chicago. Where is the future US taxpayers going to come from?

You can’t apply for a green card – well, at least not in any way I have found. So even if you wanted to, you cannot pay taxes in the US. You can be in the US legally for 6 months, but they don’t want you to pay tax.

One of the reasons for immigration law is to protect local jobs. But in your personal case, there are no jobs to protect. You customers will use you or somebody else, irrespective of where they are. There is no job to protect; just business that can be attracted to the US.

With an aging population and baby boomers retiring, the tax base in the US is potentially going to shrink. You would think the US would welcome people that can help pay the growing tax bill with open arms. But alas, current ‘policy’ does not allow it, and while politicians fight with each other, you end up paying tax in another country for work performed in another.

The $100 Startup

One of the other students, in the HTML/CSS beginner class that I am doing at Starter League, suggested that I read $100 startup. It is written by Chris Guillebeau, and was done after research he did with more than 1500 business owners.

==> Click here to buy: The $100 Startup <==

The book offers some great motivations and is in many ways very similar to The 4-hour workweek by Timothy Ferriss. He tells the stories of many of the people included in his research; why they’ve started, how they’ve started and grew from there.

I found the first half of the book to be really good and inspirational. He encourages actions and talks a lot about finding the point of convergence between what you love to do and finding something others are willing to pay for.

In The $100 Startup he also explains this idea of selling emotional benefits of your product instead of the descriptive features. The examples he gave here illustrated the point perfectly, like a ranch that sells “Be a cowboy” instead of “take a horse ride”.

I found the second half of the book a little slow going. Sometimes this type of self-help book does a great job motivating action but then slows down too much in order to try and convey very practical advice. I am sure that it is great for some people that are looking for that type of practical advice.

==> Click here to buy: The $100 Startup <==

My own take is that motivation is the biggest stumbling block. Once you take action your learn to solve the many problems that cross your path once you get going. Learning to solve some of the potential problems while you are still standing still is pointless.

Overall The $100 Startup is worth the read. But more importantly – take action! Follow Chris Guillebeau’s advice and start doing something today.

Pushing an App to the Web for the first time!

My first ever app is live on the web! Pushing an app to the Web for the first time was fun. I have been playing around with a site for ski instructor reviews. This week at The Starter League we’ve learnt how to push an app to Heroku a free online hosting platform. So after I few hiccups I’ve managed to get mine live!

It was amazing once again at the work Rails do. Rails has something called an assets pipeline. This includes all assets that you have in your app, like pictures, CSS files and more, and then put them all together and make them as small as possible to help optimize your application.

We played with building search functionality this week.

We also played with building search functionality this week.

While doing the About Us page for the app, I did some work in CSS to help it look better and styled the pictures to look like old Polaroid’s. But for some reason when I updated the live site the CSS that applied to this static page would not be there. Even though I’ve added it to the same CSS file as all the rest.

After a little research, I’ve found the solution. I had to put the CSS for static pages in a separate file and give rails a direct instruction to include it while compiling the asset pipeline. Otherwise Rails checks the CSS file before doing it and only include the CSS that is actually used in your app, leaving out anything that is not needed.

The About Us page off the dummy app I pushed to the web this week.

We also started to play with building search functionality. It is still early days, but I think building search functions is going to be fun!

I really enjoyed playing with CSS; it is amazing how much you can do with CSS3 and HTML5. I still remember the days that anything that need special style had to be an image done in Photoshop. I am glad those days are over!

Comerica Park

The city of Detroit recently went bankrupt. So I was really keen to visit it and see what it looks like. Detroit is a 6-hour train ride from Chicago, and home to the Detroit Tigers baseball team.

The Tigers had a great season last year, winning the American League, but they lost to the San Francisco Giants in the World Series. So far this year, they have been playing well, leading their division by a few games.

Outside the main gate of Comerica Park, there are Tigers everywhere!

Comerica Park was built in the late nineties, the first game was played there on 11 April 2000, against the Seattle Mariners. The Stadium only cost an estimated $300 million to built. From what I saw, I think that was money well spent. The city of Detroit has been going backwards for the last few decades, and real estate prices have naturally suffered.

One of the exhibitions depicting a decade in the Tigers history

So as part of an effort to help rejuvenate the Downtown of the city in the late 1990s’, Comerica Park and Ford Field was constructed in the heart of Detroit. Ford Field is an indoor American Football field, right across the street form Comerica Park, and is the home of Detroit Lions.

Comerica Park, was well designed, and is extremely spectator and specifically kid friendly. There is a host of off field activities to keep the entire family occupied. The game we went to turned into a real classic.

Sun setting on the scoreboard, its was a perfect afternoon for baseball

The Tigers went into the lead very early, but then lost momentum when one of their players was ejected from the game. This allowed the Kansas City Royals to come back into the game. The game was all tied in the middle of the 9th innings.

Then up stepped Miguel Cabrera, one of the Star players in the Tigers team. The crowd was getting really tense. But the All-Star did not disappoint and hit the ball out of the park very close to our seat in the right field. Everybody went crazy!

Panorame from our right field seats at Comerica park

It was a perfect night for baseball! After the game, there was an entertaining fireworks display. The sold out Comerica Park had a fantastic atmosphere! The Tigers colours have a lot of orange in them, which reminded me of the Free State Cheetahs.

All in all it was just about a perfect summers Saturday at Comerica Park, with great weather, a capacity crowd, and a tense but victorious game for the home team. I am sure the locals would be forgiven for forgetting about the cities problems on such a picture perfect occasion.