Justin Lilly

I’ve just woken up after getting some much needed sleep after the TechCrunch Disrupt conference’s Hack Day. There was a lot of great energy at the hack day and some great projects were demoed. I teamed up with Frank, and Andrew to work on what we’re tentatively calling FRM.

FRM is effectively a CRM for your friends. The problem that FRM attempts to solve is falling out of contact with friends, which we hope to solve by passively monitoring your communication habits and notifying you when you haven’t contacted people in a while.

What We Learned

The hack day was a fantastic learning experience. We learned that when building for a demo in such a short period of time, it would have been a great idea to wireframe out exactly what we wanted to present, and work on that first. As it stood, we ended up with quite a few features at about 80% completeness. Another important lessons is that I shouldn’t have done 3 hours of yardwork when I’m planning to stay awake for 30 hours.

Going forward

Going forward, I’d like to complete the functionality we set out to do, find a better name for the project, and work on integrating more communication streams (Android app, anyone?). There is also a bit amount of work in cleaning up the codebase. Its amazing how fast coding standards, commit messages, testing and documentation fly out the window when you’re coding at 4am.

Overall, I’m quite excited about what our team came up with, and while we didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, I think we’re in a good place to continue on.