The Challenge
The Nerdery’s 6th Overnight Website Challenge was this past weekend, and it was definitely well worth the endeavor.
For those of you that don’t know, the Challenge is a 24-hour event where groups of developers are paired with a non-profit and given the task of improving the non-profit’s web presence. Generally, any existing websites are relatively sub-par and do not typically draw in much traffic. The goal of the Challenge is to change that, and give non-profits a website they can be proud of, that they can update with relative ease, and that will help draw attention to their cause.
In the Challenge, I was on Team Raxacoricofallapatorius. As that may seem like a mouthful, most people stuck to calling us Team Rax. We were a group of ten Nerds spanning the entire development spectrum, from user experience, copywriting, and front-enders to make the site look beautiful to the back-end developers wiring everything up, a quality assurance professional ensuring our site functioned as it should and a project manager keeping us apprised of our clients’ needs.
The non-profit we were paired with was The Windmill Project. They focus on connecting parents of disabled children with people in similar situations and providing families with the information they need to persevere and overcome whatever challenges they may face. The link above shows the site my team developed for the challenge. To see what their old website was like, you can go to the archive. I think we did a pretty good job 
Overall, I’m extremely proud of our team and excited that we managed to keep our end of the bargain. We’ll be providing ongoing support for the next few months, and I look forward to helping them grow as an organization.
Things Learned
Building a website in 24 hours is not without its challenges. While we did very well, other teams were not so lucky. One issue that kept coming up involved people running into trouble finding a proper place to host their sites. That is, most did perfectly well developing a website, but when it finally came around to putting the code somewhere that other people could access it, they hit some snags. A friend of mine said at one point that his team worked for close to six hours attempting to overcome server issues, and this prevented them from finishing up their website.
Other issues revolve around how people decide to stay awake. I personally have sworn off soda and do not drink coffee, so there wasn’t very much I could consume that would increase my stay-awake-ability. This actually proved beneficial, as I managed to stay up for close to 28 hours and was more cognizant than the majority of my team during the final judging, perhaps because I didn’t have to worry about the crash after a caffeine high. The same friend who claimed such hideous server issues told me one of their teammates didn’t fare so well, as they ended up in the hospital after consuming far too much Red Bull (between 10 and 15 cans in the 24-hour timeframe). I hear a better alternative to loads of caffeinated beverages is to eat lots of bananas, which somehow help you to stay awake, and several friends did just that successfully.
All in all, while our team didn’t finish in the top four, I believe we managed to do something that many other teams struggled with. Our website may not be as feature-rich as some of the other sites that came out of the Challenge, but we met and exceeded our client’s needs and expectations and got their brand new website up and running on their server the day after the challenge. I welcome next year’s challenge with open arms.