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It wasn’t until the night before FullCodePress that the entire 2010 Code Blacks team sat around a table together for the first time. We had no idea what we were about to experience.

The FullCodePress concept is simple: teams of 6 build a complete website from start (i.e. meeting their client for the first time) to end (completion or what’s done by deadline) in 24 hours. There is no choice but completion as the sites created are then gifted to the charities they benefit.

You can’t be a Code Black twice - the team is fresh each year. When this year’s Code Blacks team was announced, I was a little daunted by their pedigrees. Matthew Buchanan (design), Mike Harding (front end), Sam Minnée (back end), Hadyn Green (content) and Lulu Pachuau (UX) are not people I would like to be pitted against in an intellectual dark alley.

Preparation

Post-announcement, we immediately started planning and discussing ideas, approaches and logistics. This was multi-faceted once we agreed the approach would be to create something simple, focussing on a story-based concept. We agreed that the team ethos would revolve around communication, being friendly, working hard as a team and just making it happen. After all, if you are part of something so intense, why not set yourself up to have a great time as well?

As the weeks passed, Matt and Lulu figured out a concise UX and design approach which would both cover off these requirements. Sam and Mike agreed how the front and back end processes would integrate. The Wellingtonians met over lunch. The Aucklanders met over beer. Everyone worked through potential scenarios (especially the worst case ones) so we could mitigate as much as we could without knowing who our client would be or anything about them.

The client

When we met Julie Black, one of the trustees of Te Hua Rangatahi Trust, any of my doubts about the competition immediately vanished. After an hour of introduction and brainstorm work with her, we all felt part of the Trust too. The cause itself drove us forward as much as any caffeine, sugar, electronic music or spontaneous dance parties could.

Te Hua Rangatahi Trust works with youth in the Wellington region. They run athletics, performing arts, school holiday and sports clinic programmes which aim to help their teens achieve success. It doesn’t matter if you’re Maori, Pacific Island or Pakeha. If you’re interested in their programmes, you’re welcomed. All time and resources are donated - and in some cases, provided by Julie and the trustees from their own pockets. Since any time is voluntary and highly valued, it has all been funnelled into the programmes; if more time is available, that means more programmes. If less time is available, even things like funding proposals take a back seat. They had a couple of logos designed by some of their youth, a vague idea of colours, some photos and… that’s it. So off we went.

The Trust website has four audiences:

• the young adults, many without home computers who use Facebook intensively
• their families/whānau, who the Trust tries to include as much as possible and to whom they must gain trust from
• the funding bodies and organisations whose money only helps a little
• the Trust’s operational team of volunteers who keep it all together and can benefit from centralised place for information

Process

The brainstorming session brought up a lot of ideas and almost immediately we started a juggling act of scoping and de-scoping. As much as it would have been easy to always de-scope based on what we could achieve in 24 hours, the main decisions were made around what would not work for the Trust operationally, i.e. time and resource-wise.

• Newsletter? Would be great but there’s no one to manage it so had to go.
• Bi-lingual content? Nothing pre-prepared and no one available to advise during the competition (not from lack of interest but most of the volunteers were out at weekend sporting events) so couldn’t be completed.
• Most of the young adults don’t have much access to the web but do manage to be active on Facebook? Increased priority and weighting of Facebook integration and content.
• Important to manage how many people could attend an event? Had to be a feature of the event system.
• Should we put the events themselves on Facebook? No, as this seemed to exclude those not on the social network.

We got the team off to as quick a start as possible and were lucky that Julie was happy to hang out with us. Both Lulu and I spent a lot of time getting to know Julie upfront, pulling in other people for discussions and to inform tasks required to meet our milestones. Some of the stories she shared with us through the night became less client to project team and more friend to friend. Some of them broke our hearts and some of them created a surge, an extra wind, like when Julie left late at night to pick up one of the leaders of the school holiday programmes, Jordan, who Julie felt could communicate for the youth audience. They stayed with us late into the night before leaving for a well-deserved nap around 3am.

Apart from the computers and the internet connection, our critical tools were simple: talking with each other and our clients, headphones for focussed work, large sheets of paper, markers and a whiteboard. I wrote up the high level milestones we’d agreed, knowing that these would move and change as the night wore on (as they did). During the competition, we magnified each phase and dropped down to any detail required. This flexible approach was updated on the whiteboard consistently and sometimes as we went between meetings - we didn’t want to invest time into systems which weren’t directly related to the outcomes.

From midnight on, our 2-3 hourly standing meetings became 2 hourly and then every hour. The longest period was between Julie and Jordan leaving and breakfast the next morning. Many of the volunteers had left or were napping. It started to feel cold and it was more difficult to remain as busy and focussed when a lot of the tasks left involved just you and your computer screen. We had Twitter and text messages arrive at all hours of the night (thank you World Cup). I stopped looking at the progress of the other team’s sites - it was too easy to think about them rather than zero in on what we needed to complete. I tried to take myself out of the room when I’d lose focus so the rest of the team didn’t get distracted. I joked with any remaining volunteers that I was the team’s PR rep, updating everyone I saw on the way to the bathroom.

We were filmed by volunteers, photographed by paparazzi (sometimes 4 at a time!), drank litre after litre of water, put our man Mike up to represent in an arm wrestle, ‘borrowed’ some cheese from the volunteers, laughed, blinked intensively and typed, typed, typed. There were server failures and thankfully, Mike Forbes able to come to the rescue. I taped an elevator pitch for our site at about 3am where I could barely talk I was laughing so hard. I think it was the 6am meeting, standing in a semi-circle and waiting for Matt to join that a great song came on. Almost simultaneously, the Code Black hive mind thought DANCE and for a minute, six geeks did.

Before we knew it, we looked out the window and the sky was lightening. Julie and Jordan were back. Jordan updated the Trust’s Facebook page and sat with me to load the Flickr photos and YouTube videos. (By the time the competition ended, the Trust Facebook page had 36 fans and it now has nearly 50.) Julie gave sign-off in her gentle way. With only an hour to go, Matt and Mike kicked our speaker up several notches, treating the entire floor to some inspirational montage-style tunes. It gave us a final burst. Final testing items were identified, resolved, re-tested and closed. Final-final testing items went through the same. There always seemed to be just one more issue until… there weren’t.

Challenges

There were definitely challenges along the way. When I look back, these could have seriously de-railed us but we kept shifting and changing to accommodate and re-factor people’s efforts so everyone was always busy.

The lack of source material was somewhat challenging. We’d been told that there would be some images and content in a Word document for us to start with – while there were some images and a Word doc, this was more descriptive of the Trust and mostly taken from a funding proposal-style document than the warm, friendly and youthful tone we needed to take for the site. The IA was also a bit of a moving beast through the night. Julie’s Māori is conversational and highly influenced by the Tuhoe dialect she speaks; Hadyn’s is rusty and conversational. Still, it was important to all of us that there was bi-lingual content of some description on the site. Haydn and Lulu worked closely with Julie and Jordan throughout to ensure that the bi-lingual labels on the navigation conveyed the meanings they wanted.

The Trust’s colours were dark (black, grey, maroon, green) and they wanted a look that was bright and modern to appeal to the youth audience. We were able to change the colours as long as the colours of the sports uniforms still worked with them but the question was – what to? Matt worked with Julie on trying to find a colour palette. By late evening when Julie left to go and pick up Jordan, she had a print-out in hand to get some further feedback on. When she returned, we needed to review the palette again. Serious time was spent ensuring that when she ended up going back to the original colours that it was the right decision for her and everyone she represented. Final colours weren’t signed off until Sunday morning with only 4 hours to go.

Mike and Sam knew early on that the first part of the competition would be slower for them. They worked on set up as much as possible, but with the IA and design changes, scoping and de-scoping, the main part of their work didn’t kick in until the middle of the night. Sam’s GIT history states that template integration didn’t start until about 3am – we were lucky that both Mike and Sam could code like the wind (and they also won a title for l337 code, so the quality didn’t suffer either).

The end

At 11.57 am, the site was ‘complete’. I rounded up the team and we went to declare our completion. Once everyone was done and interview times were confirmed, the Code Blacks, a few key supporters and our wonderful client went to Hashigo Zake for a well-deserved drink. We were exhausted but elated. The stories continued at the pub, where Julie told me about a “running shoes” saved search her and her husband use on TradeMe. They just buy all running shoes they can in certain sizes and they always fit someone. When they first started the athletics programme, most of the kids hadn’t had shoes. When they started being able to provide shoes for them the performances improved so they started to do it more often, all out of their own pockets. Julie hadn’t been comfortable asking the community for monetary donations on the site. We suggested that a message could be added to the support page to request donations of running shoes. Julie loved it, especially when she realised it could be done immediately and by her if she wanted to. In that moment, no matter what the judges would decide, I was so proud of what we’d done.

When you’ve been awake for more than 30 hours straight, serious things like facing a panel of judges are surreal. We went in to the judging interview and, although I remember introducing our client and project, I can’t remember much of what I said. We were each asked a number of questions over 45 minutes, though we could have spoken for hours on our project. While we waited for the verdict, time dragged after the speed and activity of the previous 24 hours. Finally, they appeared. Minor titles were awarded and we received two - WHAT COULD GO WRONG (Most Ambitious - apparently for our Facebook integration) and B1NARY SOLO (for our awesome code). The Codaroos (Australian team) were announced as the winners and it was all over. Well-played, hard won and a great time had by all.

FullCodePress changes you. It’s now Wednesday morning and I’m still having some difficulty adjusting to real life. Mundane things like laundry seem unimportant and anything happening at a regular pace seems excruciatingly slow. Even though I can go outside whenever I want to and sleep at regular intervals, I hesitate for a minute. I half expect to see one of my team walk in at any time. We all have new BFFs, great memories and we know we’ve achieved something incredible for the Trust. It rules and I’d do it all over again without blinking. There was no trophy this year for the Code Blacks but it was still all win.