It's a gorgeous, misty Thursday morning at the #AppInAWeek lake house, and we've added another 100 hours of code since Day 2, bringing us to a total of 300 hours. But, last night we ran into an unexpected snag that nearly derailed the entire Hill City Ventures project.
Here's what happened, in a nutshell:
Most of our code was built upon the foundational assumption that the API framework we've been integrating with has the ability to pull contacts by their tag. After lots of time working through ways to solve the issue, we decided that we would reach out to the API's developers for a potential solution. It could have put our entire project on hold - assuming we even got a response.
Then David came to the rescue, as he usually does when we get into a pinch. He managed to find the undocumented file that we needed, even though it was virtually non-existent on the internet and was not linked anywhere.
"IF YOU EVER NEED TO FIND ANYTHING ON GOOGLE, JUST ASK DAVID. HE WILL BE ABLE TO FIND IT IN 1/10TH OF THE TIME THAT IT WOULD TAKE YOU NOT TO FIND IT," RYAN REMARKED. "I WISH I HAD DAVID'S GOOGLE-FU."
Thank you, David, for saving us a lot of time and effort and allowing us to power ahead on Day 4! Other than that minor scare, we've had a productive week at the lake. We've split the group of developers into even smaller teams. Tony and Ryan are still working on the back-end, but the front-end team members have taken ownership over smaller pieces as we dive into specific areas of the application.
David is responsible for deployments and infrastructure, and setting up test frameworks before the launch. Jon is focusing on the dialer dashboard, and Colin is coding the stats dashboard. Brandon is working on chart visualization and integrating data from the statistics.
All of the dashboard designs, tables, views and interface UI have been completed by our talented creative director, Josh. Meanwhile, Jen and Chris left the lake yesterday to support our SharpTop client, and recent recipient of the Virginia Small Business Award: Generation Solutions. Congratulations, Generation Solutions!
In other news, Mitchell's Point, a local marina on Smith Mountain Lake, was kind enough to lend us a Four Winds Horizon speed boat until Saturday. We've really enjoyed exploring the lake - even though we got poured on last night during the storm and had to race back to the mansion in the rain. It's certainly never a dull moment during #AppInAWeek!
We also got our air conditioner repaired, which means the house is freezing. The guys have had to improvise ways to keep warm, including huddling together on the couch and sharing blankets.
In more ways than one, our team has never been closer!