Rafa Vargas on Software Development

I have been translating my curriculum page last couple of days and I remembered something: I participated in Imagine Cup 2007 Korea and my team got the third place in Spanish finals. It rained a lot since then, as we said in Spain, (it means a lot of time has passed) and I realized I have ever written about what my project was about after all.

Maybe I dismissed this post too long, but now it is time to make some self-reflection and try to learn about  what went wrong and what was great about my partners. And more… where we are at the present moment.

Recruiting a bunch of geeks

In the beginning, our team was compound from three different universities: University of Alicante, Huelva and Sevilla. It was during the CodeCamp held in Madrid two years ago. We were having a party in one bungalow and I proposed joining Imagine Cup Software Design contest to some of my former colleagues from DotNetClubs. Most of us were inspired by the victory of our DotNetClub’s president, Miguel Ángel Ramos, in the previous one.

Later, we decided that managing people from several locations would be painful and the first change in our team arrived. We replaced some the guy from UHuelva by someone who I personally knew and had supreme coding skills: Jose Carlos Vázquez.

In this manner, we have two subgroups: Alicante and Sevilla. At this stage, we had a some not-too-bright ideas and too much communication by email. We had a few names for the project, however Miguel Ángel Ramos proposed us one great name: Open Learning Environment.

Open Learning Environment original logo.

When it seems we were about to code, someone fell off from the Alicante’s subgroup. But we replaced him quickly with a great guy: Daniel Micol. He was a Software Development Engineer intern at Microsoft the previous summer and had excellent mastery in the software crafts.

The definitive team

©2007 OLE Logo and poster design by Miguel Librero

From left to right: Jose Carlos Vázquez, Daniel Micol, Rafael Vargas (me), and Miguel Llopis. Okay we were not terrific, but we were competent ;)

Coding week

Although we started coding after Microsoft’s Developer Day (after discussing some design issues, of course) we spent our last week before presentation coding at Jose Carlos’ (he lives in a small village where one member of our team would not find so many distractions like going out, etc). He was our host and provide us a nice environment to work with all the infrastructure we need: a server, a router, a rdbms, etc. We had all we need and what’s more: free desserts from his father’s family company: los Vazquez.

During this week, we worked up to 18 hours a day writing lots of code, debugging, solving issues and some functional specifications. I have never drunk so much caffeine beverages a day… but it was fun.

However, there are a few things that were no fun. There were not so much consensus about what were the most important features we should develop in first place. One member of the team delegated his work on a kid while he was surfing those pesky social sites like the Facebook or Badoo… and what’s more: he refused to use Subversion to work as the rest of the team were doing. This pigheaded colleague made me suffer real pain in the ass when I had to integrate all the work.

We also made a fatal error: we made the user interface in Windows Presentation Foundation when there were not good tools available and that made us had real headaches… I bet you know who wanted to use WPF. Yes, he was.

Kezo

Kezo was our mascot. It was a dromedary camel plush that was hanging around in our headquarters by no apparent reason. We took it with us at the scenario during the presentation and we dedicated him a slide in our presentation. :)

When we were so much exhausted or simply blocked of coding, we used to play with it or dropping it on someone who spent more time surfing Badoo or IMing than coding. You all know who I mean… :P

We also took some action shots.

The day before

Since we had not finish on time, we had to code during the night before the show. It is no fun staying in a hotel at 4 am coding and solving other’s bugs by their lack of focusing and his love of social networking sites.

I remembered I slept three hours after two days without sleep. I went home and cut my hair and my bear and when I was back in the hotel at 10.00 am, my team was discussing about something that was not working properly: questions didn’t show in the proper order. They were talking louder and louder. In that moment was when I acted as a real project manager and calm down my team.

Presentation

Presentation was the worst part of this story. We presented in last position, but we finished doing our slides in the middle of the scenario. What a mess…

I also was very tired and I did not prepared my talk so people was not paying too much attention and that was getting me nervous.

But if that was bad, moving all the infrastructure from Jose Carlos’ to the scenario because one member of our team hardcoded IP addresses was evil. Guess who was him.

Our presentation was a complete disaster… however, we did not realize until now.

Third prize

Surprisingly, we got the third prize. Some people told us to take participation in the Software Design invitational of the Imagine Cup because it seemed that was not going to exist hard contestants to surpass. However, we relaxed too much and one member of our team relaxed even more… he was paying more attention to IM than the project and he was unable to focus for a little.

Photo by Mónica García

When they announce we had the third prize, it was so shocking to us. We firmly believed that we went to win. We were not a humble team and our expectative were broke like a glass jar. In spite of not winning, I think I really won a valuable lesson about life: being humble.

Lessons learnt

Despite all suffering, lack of sleeping, etc. I must admit I learnt a few things during Imagine Cup: how to manage a team, who I will ever work with again, how to talk with mass media and why not to be an early adopter.

One year later…

Several months had passed since then. Although we still keep in touch, we took different paths and each one is on his own way.

From right to left:

• Daniel Micol is now a Software Development Engineer in Microsoft SQL Server team in Redmond, WA (Microsoft Corp.)
• Jose Carlos Vázquez is about to finish his B.S. in Computer Science and works in his personal and interesting projects such as portal site for Agolpaitos, a social club of which I am also a member.
• Miguel Llopis recently finished his B.S. in Computer Science and recently received a Windows Live Award during Imagine Cup 2008 held in Paris. (He tried it again, with not so much success).
• Rafael Vargas keeps studying at University of Seville and working on Open Source projects in his free time. Aside, he also works on Minix 3 Operating System USB Stack support sponsored by Google Summer of Code program.

P.S: Wanna more fun? Download and read our press release here.