10 tips for the Web Cup
Hello World!
Last year together with my collages we participated in the Web Cup. It was a nice and fun experience but this blog post is not to evaluate the Web Cup, but rather to give some tips to the participants from what we learnt. Here we go:
1. Don’t take it too seriously, have fun!
Participate to enhance your team work, meet other developers, increase your knowledge and have fun. Enjoy the experience and focus on building the best Web Site you can instead of focusing on winning and what are the other teams doing.
2. Don’t code immediately! Discuss!
The theme won’t be easy, it will be quite unorthodox, probably something you never done before.
So, don’t code right away. Take the time to think about the challenge, brainstorm, think creatively and focus on the whole concept and how innovative it is first. Then, the next phases will be much easier.
3. Know your strength and weakness
Know your team members, who codes, who designs, who leads the team, how to deal with social media and who will communicate with the Web Cup team.
Also, try to figure out other strengths too, such as general knowledge, quiz…you never know what challenge may come up 🙂
4. Focus on the product, not the code
While its true that the code should be functional, don’t spend too much time refactoring.(It’s not a coding challenge). Focus on what the customer thinks and what the user of the web site will expects. Think of it like a product that you will sell later. What would your customer want to see or use?
5. Be creative!
Everybody know how single page app or vertical scrolling web sites work and the judges most probably sees and creates those daily. Think different and build something creative. Last year, what the Prodigeous team did was amazing, it was another level and something that I could not even imagine to do. So you get what I mean.
6. Plan carefully
After brainstorming, prepare a plan and split the tasks carefully. Set some break points, e.g, each 3 hours, stop working and look at the web site from a customer perspective. Monitor the time carefully also. Is it what you planned?
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| Web Cup 2015, the countdown is 00:00:00 |
7.Test! Test! Test!
Since the work will be split, do regular commits and do regular testing, integration testing and don’t forget, test on multiple devices and browsers! If a bug is spotted in the last 2 hours, this will be quite tough to fix. Find bugs early and fix them early.
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| Web Cup 2015: Testing our App on multiple devices |
8. Deploy
Do regular commits and deploy. Don’t wait for the last minute as it will be slow when everybody will try to do so. Be safe!
9. Think how to sell it too!
While developing the App, start thinking how will it differentiates and how to sell it. Maybe, some hour before, have someone start working on the presentation. Because the pitch will have a great impact on the results. You may built the best tool, but if the pitch goes wrong, it won’t have the expected impact.
10. Some warm clothes and bring some snacks
This will be more than 24 hours, and the weather is a bit cold this week. Bring everything you need to be comfortable and to be able to code for 24 Hours. Coffee, energy drinks, snacks. Everything will be needed.
Happy Coding and Have fun!
