Just got back from Startup Weekend and boy, is my brain tired!

This is not a rant. I entirely enjoyed myself and would do it again. But /var/log/rant is where I go to write about tech stuff, so here it is.

It was the Greater Lafayette Startup Weekend, held at LafayetteTechHUB. Concept works like this:

• People pitch ideas on Friday. Lots of ideas.
• Everyone votes about the ones they think are most doable.
• They then group up and work on the Minimum Viable Product of the idea until about 6pm Sunday.
• Like "Lion's Den", mentors judge who has the best idea, presentation and product

This was me the whole weekend.

I don't want to say much, because the idea isn't mine, but I can say it involves SMS in a way that involving SMS makes sense. I used Twilio to do the SMS, plus a few phone calls. There exists Perl libraries for Twilio, which I have tried to poke at before, but the best documentation was for PHP, so I learned PHP with the better documentation rather than dig through an API I don't understand with code I did.

But, I met some people, people I had previously talked to at GLITS or seen present at BoilerWeb or followed on Twiter, or just had never seen before. I learned about PhoneGap and a few other shim libraries you can use to develop mobile apps with Javascript.

But that isn't the most valuable thing I got.

The absolutely most valuable thing I learned from the experience is how much you can get done with a little vision, a little knowledge and talent, a little money (not much, even) and a lot of dedication. It really was a wonder to see.

Even if I had to look up from the laptop and take my headphones off to notice.