192 hours. That’s how long we had from finding out what our project was to presentation time. Take away 7 hours every night for sleep because I’m not one of those people that can function on less than that for more than a day and a few hours every day for pesky things like showering and feeding myself and my dog and we were left with 112 hours to get it all done. Just under James Franco’s time to severing a limb.

Day one was a lot of laying down the base work. Setting up our Trello board, setting stand up times and really digging into what features we wanted loopi to have. Oh right, it wasn’t even named loopi yet. 24 hours gone.

Then it was Friday. Hey we got a map to show up on the page. Thanks Google maps! And we can get our geolocation. This isn’t so bad. Wait, how do we get the latitude and longitude one mile from the office in any direction. Oh no. 6 hours later… GeoKit! Once again Ruby delivers with some magic in the form of a gem and we get our waypoints.

Saturday was the day of the MVP. We set an initial goal of having minimum viable product on Monday at the latest and the angels sang when we had 5k routes on Saturday. Spirits were high and what once seemed like a herculean task was beginning to seem more in the scope of reality than we initially though. We even had time for a Padres game. Too bad they lost.

The next few days had their highs and lows with the front end coming together and loopi finally getting a name. Hey the name and face are important for branding, and picking something good with an available url is no small feat. We came together as a group to check in on how the design was coming along and the loopi orange stuck it out.

Wednesday was decided to be our last day to add new features. So Wednesday after fumbling around for what seemed like days we finagled out a url to save for users to get back to routes they liked. We had everything we planned on. All our must have features we on our deploy list on Trello. It was truly a great feeling. We had a few beers.

The whole week flew by really. We presented our work with pride on Friday and it felt great. Sure the code could be cleaned up, but that could wait. Now was the time to celebrate with my team. We had truly come together. This final project, like everything else done at DBC was done in the spirit of collaboration. I think any one of the four of us could have made it by ourselves (maybe not in 8 days) but it would never have been as good as it is. We made each other better and therefore we made loopi better.

Don’t forget to check it out at loopi.run