...And The Django Dash Is Complete.
The first Django Dash has just completed. Astute readers will notice a peculiar delay in this post from the start of the competition, i.e. it's been 96 hours since I announced the start of a 48 hour programming competition.
Yes, that math doesn't work out. Everything went smoothly up until 17 hours into the competition. People were committing, the site was up/responsive and things were great. Then The Planet's Houston data center, where Web Faction has some of their servers, experienced an explosion in their power room, killing power to the entire data center. This took out the Django Dash site AND Subversion access throughout the rest of Saturday and all through Sunday.
Rather than stop the competition or delay it an restart, I asked the contestants to press on as best they could and extended the deadline by 2 days (to accommodate those who had to go back to work). To their credit, many of them did, which was much appreciated.
Overall, I'm still pleased with the end result, though I would've been much happier had there been no server issues. I've learned a couple lessons about running an event like this from this Django Dash, which I will write up later this week. I also have a little more open source to add to Toast Driven, so I'm excited about that.