Devsta: The Debrief
October 8, 2008Well It’s been almost 24 hours since the competition closed and I’m still a little tightly wound / sleep deprived but I’m still excited about our submission.
Unfortunately it would seem as though no one else is excited by it…well no one on the Internet but people I tell in person seem to think it’s a good idea which makes me wonder have we done a poor job of explaining it or do I just do a good job of selling it. People seem to be more excited about our Hoff Sidebar Gadget then our main app…damn you Hoff. There’s a third possibility that people are just too kind but I don’t think it’s that – I was just reading an article that did a pretty good job of trashing the contest and the developers who entered.
The article (http://www.itwire.com/content/view/21016/53/ with a lot of corrections published in a second article here http://www.itwire.com/content/view/21044/53/) seem to think Console Connect is the winning entry.
Personally I thought the article was very negative and well, factually incorrect for the most part (at least until the second article) but quite a few other places (such as Slashdot) have republished the story citing ITWire as it’s source. It was fairly obvious from the outset that the website hadn’t been hacked and someone had just entered spurious data in to the form but I guess it’s the headline that counts.
Also, I could just be a little bitter that we didn’t even get a mention 
I think this comes down to the “Generation Y” thing, I want answers today, right here, right now mentality. I want some kind of vindication that I didn’t waste 9 days (4 of which were weekends!) working on an application for nothing!
I just want to say thanks to the other developers who entered – it’s not easy working “for free” for a week in the hope of winning something. I’m sure they all had to make social/work sacrafices to be able to compete and then after that to have someone trash your work (or ignore it) is very frustrating.
For people who want to know more about our app I suggest reading Michael’s blog, he’s no where near as bitter/jaded as I am and has posted a nice little write up
Try not to get so upset be your detractors, it’s a waste of time. Well done for getting what looks like a great entry in. It takes a special type of person to spend all your spare time for 200 hours and 8 minutes writing a competitive entry for a competition, oh, and you have software development skills and be involved with the latest technologies. It’s easy to write a factually incorrect article with a misleading title for the purpose of getting hits to your site.
I also saw a comment on Slash Dot from guy saying real developers, like him, won’t enter the marketing sham cause he’s got real work to do. Well to me that sounds pretty stupid from someone who’s commenting on Slash Dot articles about it.
http://www.xkcd.com/481/
Cheers,
Good luck in the comp, but I want to win it too
Ps. Love the catch phrase in the banner (not that I love VB itself)
Thanks for the comments – I know I shouldn’t let it get to me but I don’t understand how you can spend 6 pages writing about a hack that didn’t occur and paying out on calculators.
I reckon your app is a real contender for first prize, I just don’t see why he couldn’t write about that (and our app!)
What would we do without xkcd
thesarge: I agree, don’t worry too much about it. I know there were a couple of bugs with the website initially (e.g. that thing with the screenshots) and people submitting fake entries and that, but it’s nowhere near as bad as they made out in that itwire article.
By the way, I thought your game was really cool. A really unique idea!
I was also a bit jealous when I saw tarnacious’s game… if only I’d taken the time to learn WPF or Silverlight before the competition started
I’m just waiting for them to release the submissions so we can all give them a try…