Well, today kind of sucked. Not all of it was terrible, but enough that it’s kind of spoiled the rest of the day for me.

We delivered our pitches to the entire school today, and man, there were a lot of pitches. There are 28 of us, and there were 28 pitches. Some people didn’t pitch at all, but some people pitched two or even three different ideas. I even gave a few of my extra ideas out to people who hadn’t planned to pitch. Everything went well, and there were a LOT of good ideas. However, there were quite a few ideas that seemed like jokes or were poorly thought out. No big deal though, since there were plenty of good pitches to choose from.

Voting turned out to be a disaster, though. Rather than let us each vote on the seven apps we wanted to see get made, we were each only allowed to vote once. I knew this was a bad idea, because anyone who pitched would only vote for their own idea. Of course, that’s exactly what happened. One app had five votes (I’m assuming those who voted for it planned it out ahead of time), and four other apps had two votes each, which was enough to confirm them as final projects.

There were two slots left, but there was a tie. a fifteen-way tie, each of which had only one vote. As expected, everyone who had pitched an idea voted for their own app. We had to hold another vote to decide which two apps would get moved forward. There were several requests to scrap the original results and re-vote, but they were denied. We voted again, most people voted for their own apps again, and the two winning apps each had only four votes.

I don’t mind that my app ideas weren’t picked, since I can always make them after DBC is over. My frustration comes from the fact that so many great ideas were pitched and the ideas that were pushed through were not the best that we have to offer as a cohort.

After voting on apps was through, it was time to request the app that we each wanted to work on. I got my first choice, which was a weather app that would dig into D3.js and make some beautiful graphs from the data we found. I chose this app not because I am interested in D3 or weather, but because the team lead is incredibly talented and I know we’ll end up with a decent product at the end of it. For me, it’s all about the demo-ability of the app, so I expect great things in the next nine days.

We immediately sat down together to go over the plan for the app. Our team lead had already created a basic weather app for his Phase 2 final project, so this was meant to be an extension of that. We would find a better way to present the data, expand the coverage to the entire country, and display graphs of the weather changes over time.

I know the next week will be challenging for me, mainly because we’ll be getting into technologies I’m not familiar with, namely React.js and D3. I’m looking forward to pushing myself and delivering a product I can show off to potential employers.

I guess we’ll have to see. Until tomorrow, I’m Edwin Unger and I’m a junior developer.