A look back on Imagine Cup
Perhaps its a little bit too late, but its been said that the wise man learns from his own failures as well as those of others.
Reading this post on on a failed startup really brings back (fond?) memories of FYP, and JonShonRonVons’ adventures with Bolesis as an entry for the Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition (2007).
I realise Bolesis and GameClay faced similar problems despite being completely different projects, and on hindsight, would seem like it (Bolesis) was doomed to fail from the start as well. So the question then would be if I, having known that we would fail before starting out, would have bothered to even embark on such a project?
Hell yes.
(This is, of course, putting aside the fact that we didn’t have a choice to not even begin since it was, in all actuality, our FYP submission as well and was required for graduation.)
If you have not already read that post, go read it. Now. It presents a very candid look of the rise (and fall) of aN IT startup. If you’re not in the software industry. You can stop reading here.
Bolesis. It seemed like a very novel and innovative idea at that time, providing a framework to catalogue and distribute the educational resources of the world, especially those that were just lying around in cyberspace collecting cyber-cobwebs. But further down the road, it proved to not be the holy grail we thought it was.
Perhaps the idea was too young and ‘before-its-time’-ish. Perhaps the (greater part of the) industry was not ready to share their materials, which was the basis for our entire project. Perhaps the team (myself especially) wasn’t competent enough to undertake the ambitious project. Whatever the case, I’m officially classifying Bolesis as a ‘failed’ project (since it wasn’t really a startup per say).
But the one thing this failure has taught me is that failures are not necessarily all bad. Mr Maran, the HOD for Pupil Development in VS had a saying that went along the lines of ‘In Victoria, we don’t teach you to stay down when you fall, we teach you to get back up and climb higher.’ I think that’s exactly what the failure of Bolesis is. A wake up call and more importantly an opportunity to climb higher.
What exactly are the factors that I feel led to its failure? I’ll leave that for another post. But for now I guess the summary of that post by Jonathan Tang can be condensed (somewhat) as written (in bold) on the 2nd paragraph,
If your idea starts with “We’re building a platform to…” and you don’t have a billion dollars in capital, find a new idea. Now.
For those who don’t know, our ‘elevator pitch’ for Bolesis went something like this. “We’re building a platform to enable the widespread distribution of credible learning resources, allowing both learners and content providers to collaborate in a content rich environment.”
And no, we did not have a billion dollars in capital. In fact, we had none.
20Q – Neural Network
Saw this link ok Angeline’s game blog.
OMFG.
Bloody hell. Its Neural Network based.
Damn. I wanna take a peak at the algorithm behind it.
The Hello World Collection
Cool stuff.
4 more days to The Bucket List reveal. =)
Hacknot – User Is A Four Letter Word
Hacknot – User Is A Four Letter Word
Interesting read for us Interns me thinks. Especially as to how a ‘user-focused’ approach impacts software development.
Perhaps the most common ploy of the passive aggressive user is procrastination. When asked to participate in interviews or submit to any demand on their time, the user offers only perfunctory compliance, complaining that they just can’t find the time to put in greater effort, given the demands of their existing duties. They know that if they demur frequently enough, you will probably stop assigning them tasks altogether.
My this situation sounds mighty familiar. Could be the reason my code’s been sitting in the pre production environment for more then a week, only to have the users tell me, on the very same day that I’m supposed to get the Requirements Document signed off no less, that there needs to be some amendments to the logic and documentation.
And no, this is not the first time such as happened. I’m ranting. I know. Sue me.
Being the Averagest
I think this is the best explanation I’ve found so far on where my competive streak has gone (in terms of programming, not grades)..
Maybe we don’t do it because we don’t have the equivalent of a GPA for engineers. If we had such a number — let’s call it PNQ for “Productivity ‘N’ Quality” — then SDEs would immediately begin competing to improve their PNQ. But it doesn’t appear to be possible to measure or compute a fine-grained PNQ value for an SDE. I think you can measure someone’s skills, but that’s really more a measure of potential than performance.
Stevey’s Home Page – Being the Averagest
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