#iSoc12 The second week of FlatTurtle
Hi faithful iRail blog readers. My name is Nik and I am working on the FlatTurtle project. In this post I will recap last week’s events on the project and share some of my experiences with #iSoc12.
The project
When the week started, we decided to move to a Jumping Castle PHP framework called CodeIgniter. This was a bit of a challenge for Glenn and me because we were new to this framework and were pretty inexperienced with php. After two days we finished porting the previous project to the CodeIgniter project, after that we started working on the back-end and started thinking about the possibilities with the interface.
On Thursday evening we got the specifics of our projects that we have to finish on Wednesday. We have to finish a working tablet interface to magnify the Turtles on the screen. The back-end that commands the screen is working, and now we are working on authentication, the Android app for the tablet and we are fixing small bugs in the InfoScreens.
The pitches
This week Pieter introduced the war table to the iSoc teams. At the war table the iSoc teams would pitch their project to important people in the open data/business world.
On Tuesday we had our first pitch to Joke De Nul. We only got notified 15 minutes before the pitch so you can imagine that we were pretty nervous. All in all I think the pitch went pretty well and in hindsight there was no reason to be nervous.
Pitching FlatTurtle to Joke De Nul
On Thursday we had our second pitch, and we were told it was a very important one. We had to pitch our project to the investor of FlatTurtle Cristophe Petitjean. We were (again) pretty nervous, probably even more than last time. Luckily Jens joined us for this one and we had some time to prepare this time, so we made a small presentation. The pitch went great (see Yeri’s post), and it was a great experience!
My iSoc12 experience
I am happy that I accepted this student job instead of Bouncy Castle For Sale going to work in a factory, but that choice really was a no-brainer. #iSoc12 is everything that was promised, it is a learning experience that I would recommend to anyone interested in not having a ‘normal’ vacation job. At first I was not looking forward to do presentations and ‘pitch’ the project, but now I am pretty happy that we had to, it’s something you have to learn eventually so why not start now!
