Inspired by my fellow teammate, Justin Grammens, I’ve decided I should say a little about the F1 Web Challenge I am participating in tomorrow.
The F1 Web Challenge is a charity event where teams of developers and designers are paired with a nonprofit and are given 24 hours to build the nonprofit a website. The catch is that pairings aren’t announced before the start of the event and those 24 hours are consecutive. Crazy? Maybe. Fun? Definitely. Worth it? Absolutely.
Last spring I remember seeing some tweets about the event and I thought it was a really cool idea. Having worked for a nonprofit myself at one point, I knew that they often lack the personnel, funds, and knowhow to pull off a great website themselves. So when the call went out on the local Ruby user’s mailing list, I jumped at the chance and found a spot on the Ruby.mn team.
I’ve been more than impressed with the people on my team. Within weeks of the team forming, we had 2 sponsors; Github and Tightrope Media Systems. Our sponsors really helped push our team up above the rest. With the funds donated by TRMS, we were able to purchase hosting for our team website, hosting for the nonprofit, and team t-shirts. Github provided us with a repository for our team website and the nonprofit. Thanks to Sam Schroeder for talking to Github and thanks to John Reilly for talking to his boss at TRMS.
I couldn’t let John and Sam be the only ones to step up for the team. I assumed the role of t-shirt designer even though I’d never done any t-shirt design before. With some help from one of last year’s team members and some feedback from the group, I was able to put a design together. I was happy with what I was able to come up with and I’m anxious to see how the finished product turned out. At the very least, we’ll look like a team!
It is my plan to tweet, live blog, and take photos throughout the day and night. I’m hoping to make a few posts here tomorrow. Follow me (@jrmehle) and @webchallenge on Twitter. Watch my Flickr stream for photos. FriendFeed aggregates all of the previously mentioned content sources, so that would be a place to watch too. Who knows, I may end up with Ustream account at some point to live-stream the event too. The festivities kick off at 9AM and will run through 9AM on Sunday.
