Earlier today, I retweeted a blog post written by Derrick Ko, an acquaintance of mine who is now in KickSend about an open letter to Angel’s Gate. I have a disclaimer to make. When I retweeted and shared this on Facebook, I have yet to have watched a single episode of the Reality TV show and this bothered me all evening especially since one of the Angel’s is a 2nd Level connection of mine. So much so that I decided to dedicate a few hours of my time to actually watching the entire set of episodes they have uploaded thus far and I now feel that I need to get some truth out about the show and my feelings about it
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Hackweekend – Here’s What Help Us Focus
In my previous posts – Part 1 and Part 2 of how we started and built a hackathon from ground up, I began breaking down the DNA of Hackweekend. Here is the next post of the series.
Our next challenge proved to be interesting. Gathering amazing talent under one roof means that everyone is driven by their own agenda. Now while this is great from a creativity standpoint, having people work on their own agendas doesn’t always deliver simply because everyone is driven by different motivations and scope and move at a different pace on their own ideas. This was also one of the reasons why alot of the previous hackathons did not deliver in the first place. They were either, too wide or too niched.
The problem we had to solve was, how do we get all these developers to code on something we thought was cool and deserved some attention. The solution was not as simple as we thought. We needed a focus area that was not too broad but at the same time not too niche that people didn’t know or did not want to hack on it. We also needed something that was a current hot topic in the Technology world that everyone was eager to tackle.
Hackweekend – The Secret of Attracting Top Developers
A few days ago, I began writing about Hackweekend and How we organized Malaysia’s Premier Hackathon. I ended it with the three questions that drove us to conceive Hackweekend.
We continued by breaking down the problem to smaller chunks and continued to iterate on the solution.
How do we make developers want to join us ?
This was partially tricky because the Customer in this case had a unique position. We knew that developers are usually overworked during weekdays, either during their day jobs or in the nights working on their own projects. The question then evolved to, how do we make them want to spend a weekend with us doing the very same thing ?
Hackweekend – Building a Hackathon You Can be Proud of
I recently decided to resign/take a leave of absence from the Hackweekend Organizing Committee. Despite this, I feel that’s its important that I share how we collectively organized Malaysia’s Most Premier Hackathon – Hackweekend
Malaysia vs Singapore – The Paradigm of State Part 1
There’s something I need to get out there. Something deep inside that has been bugging me for the past 3 and 1/2 Years that I have been in Malaysia. In one of my old blogs, I wrote about the sorry state of the Malaysian Open Source scene where despite a large amount of talented developers, it never seemed to move anywhere due to the infighting, the politics, and the huge egos that govern it. Unfortunately that plague is still around but in a much more potent form with the local web scene.