Success and Lessons from Startup Weekend - Pivotal Labs

Success and Lessons from Startup Weekend: via @pivotallabs Now it’s your turn! Feb 7-9 in #yyc

At the Toronto Startup Weekend Maker Edition , my team and I created a solution called Pawly . It’s a robot equipped with a camera that allows you to check-in on your pet at home from your mobile phone. After a whirlwind 54 hours, we were extremely excited to have placed second in the competition. Here are three lessons that I learned firsthand from Startup Weekend: 1. Write it from Scratch Time is a huge constraint in a hackathon. Early on, there will be an important decision to be made: Should we go with a library that will do everything we need it do, but that nobody is familiar with? Or should we go with a library with less long-term feasibility, or perhaps even write the code ourselves? Given the time constraints in the case of a hacker weekend, you should almost always build the prototype from scratch or the library that teammates are most familiar with. If you don’t...

Full article: http://pivotallabs.com/success-and-lessons-from-startup-w...