The ADC2 Experience
Submitting txeet for ADC2 is a mixture of many feelings – exciting, frustrating, tiring, regretful, and a great experience.
The decision to join ADC 2 was in early June. The prize (near $2 million in total) is a huge incentive that gets me excited. Who would not. ADC 2 is like American Idol for geeks.
In mid June, I have conceived the idea of txeet. It would be an SMS application with the slogan "have fun texting". I text regularly, and always wish that the native messaging application can do much more. txeet would supplement what the native messaging lacks.
I began brainstorming ideas for 2 weeks, and drafted the design with another 2 weeks. By the time I began implementation/coding, it was late July.
A big mistake I had was to choose Google App Engine (GAE) in Java as the server technology. Pardon me. GAE is great, I love it and it would be my choice for server technology. But I am new to GAE, and there is so much to learn, so many pitfalls to fall into.. I ended up spending 3 tiring weeks to get things done with GAE – implementing Restlets, using JDO, writing queries, doing pagination, serializing/deserializing JSON format, etc..
By the time I am done with the server side, I am left with the last 2 weeks of August to implement the Android client. To begin with, I had not much experience with this new platform. I have co-write only one app for Android.
Time flies, and the dateline (31st August) reached quickly. The android app was only 40% completed, and was also not fully tested. On that last day, I make the decision to drop all the incomplete features. It was regretful, but I had to. I threw away much of the features and was left with just 5%..
I submitted the app just hours before the closing dateline.
I believe I have no chance of winning, but participation counts. To see my app being downloaded, used and voted by Android users would be exciting. I wish the best to all who had created mobile applications for ADC2.
All in all, it is a great experience for the 2 months working on it (:
