So we survived Plat_Forms. Overall I think the contest was fun, interesting, and very well run. But the real test of this is going to be how the results come out.
I think we fared well, compared to the other Perl teams, but we certainly did make some mistakes. We didn't prepare our VMWare server image as well as we should have. We also took the approach of building major pieces of the functionality and then linking them all up towards the end. In retrospect, we should have taken a more (ugh I hate saying this) Agile Programming approach and done more small iterations. Normally this isn't at all an issue, but with the entire development happening in 30 hours it would have been a better approach.
What I really underestimated was how much of a role fatigue played in this contest. I guess I'm not as young as I used to be! We had a few big mistakes that can only by explained by being way too tired to be coding. If the contest had been three 10 hour sessions or even 2 15 hour sessions we would have done at least 50% better than we ultimately did.
