Wednesday, November 24, 2010

The 7cubed Project

Check this out: http://7cubedproject.com/

7 UW programmers making 7 apps for 7 days. Very cool. Today is Day 5.

Day 1 was Quick Cite. With this mobile app, you can scan any book and the formatted bibliography will be sent to your email.

Day 2 was UWChat. This lets you check into UW rooms and have chat sessions with people in the same room as you.

Day 3 was Minehub, a dynamic Minecraft server.

Day 4 was supposed to be something called "AwesomeTracker", but unfortunately they were unable to ship it on time. They said that they'll get back to it after the week is over.

This seems like an interesting test of the limits of agile programming. The group says that a highly skilled team of developers can successfully follow an agile methodology where they measure releases on the order of hours. So far, it seems to be working quite well. Of course, there have been some hiccups. The failure to ship on day 4 is perhaps the biggest. The other big one is that during the rush to get Quick Cite out, they accidentally shipped code with the email functionality commented out. I think that these sort of problems are almost unavoidable when you are developing this fast.

In any case, I'm really interested in what else they can create. This seems like a really cool experiment, and a lot of fun for the coders involved.

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