Last night I attended the first AllNiter project hosted at Cospace in Austin Texas.  The goal of the event was to develop an iPhone app ready for the app store in 12 hours from 10pm Friday to 10am Saturday.

It was a fun and completely Austin type of event.  We had designers, developers, business people and general geeks of all stripes show up with all levels of expectations.  I had talked with organizer Jei Gaither on the phone once, but out of the 15 or so people who showed up, I had only met a hand-full before in real life. And I think most people there were in the same situation. 

We started off the night with Jei talking about his idea of an app that would allow users to aggregate polling data from Twitter into a graphical user interface.  It was an idea worth exploring and soon the room was bubbling with excitement saying "Oh, and it could also..." and "What if we..." .

Soon we divided into teams focused on Front-end development and design, Back-end development and architecture, and Business Development and Marketing.  We moved into different rooms to work on small-group tasks and regrouped throughout the night to make sure everyone was still on the same track.

I was very impressed with how everyone involved slipped easily into their roles and worked together.  Most of us didn't know each other.  I only knew three of the 15 or so people there, but in true Austin fashion we pulled together and it was amazing to see the gaps in experience filled so naturally.

The goal was to knock it out by 10am, but by 6:30 those of us on the biz-dev teams had reached a point that we couldn't go forward without a working application.  The development teams were losing steam as well, so after a quick regroup and discussion about where the next steps lie, we decided to call it a night.  We also agreed to regroup in two weeks to finish the project.  This time we'll do it from 10am to 10pm...because we're not young men anymore.

We didn't accomplish exactly what we started out to do.  We identified some pretty serious problems during the night that gave me some pause as to the viability of the application we were trying to build. I think that may have contributed to the general loss of steam early in the morning.

But I think the idea of the AllNiter project is great.  We worked quickly and easily together and the result was a stunning level of collaboration among the attendees. 

At the next event, we'll have a chance at another application.  I'm convinced that this is a sound process and with the right idea, it could produce a viable start-up.