I will first admit that this I’d originally titled this post “Interactive? Interawesome!” but then realized it was the worst post title EVER, but I laughed so hard when I thought of it that I figured I almost had to use it. Anyhoo.
Part of the biggest bigness of this program is the first-year presentations in Red’s class — getting five strangers together, having them watch a presentation, and saying “cool, now you have a week to react. Same time next week, come back and fill up 25 minutes.” Yeah, it’s a trip.
My group (Ben Chao, Ben Yee, Evrim Sahin and Ji-Sun Lee) met up the first day of class, said hi, exchanged emails, realized we’d need to think up something. And then we met for hours every day, and thought up many, many things, some functional, some funny, but none really in step with what we wanted, really. We met. We stressed:
Some of the ideas:
And then came HelpTank.org. We realized we wanted to help people, but we didn’t know how. We needed a place to start. So when we couldn’t find one that really matched our needs, we made one. I’ll have to go into the whys and wheres later, but it’s really pretty killer how everyone pitched in. Most group projects are at best a collection of people where one or two do most of the work and the rest watch and tell jokes, and at worst are utter clusterfucks, but this was in every sense of the word a true collaboration. One person would post an idea, someone else would go tweak it, fix another bug, submit another idea, and so on. It ruled.
And we got it live:
And we were really, really happy. Like, woah happy. And then we tweaked it for two days and presented it, and people didn’t hate it. And that was even cooler. And now people wanna help, which is SWEET.
…except now we actually have to work on it, which will be fun and rewarding, but also insanity uncorked. I think it’ll prove to be really killer in the end, but we’ll have to see — it needs a lot of work, but the founding idea is really solid. Time will tell … after I do all my pComp labs, anyway.
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