East Coast vs. West Coast - It's On

2009-04-06

Django Dash, "a chance for Django enthusiasts to flex their coding skills", is coming at the end of May. The idea is to give developers a weekend to build a site - any site - with high scores given to those that are the most polished at the end of the 48-hour deadline. What counts is speed and code quality, not the concept itself.

But what about a terrible concept ... flawlessly executed?

Personally, I think a bad idea is all the better for exhibiting Django's deadline-beating capabilities. If you go in with a viable concept, it'll likely something you've been noodling on for a while. But go in with a bad idea and you're truly starting cold.

So pyDanny and I have come up with a side bet. The details are here.

He believes that living at the epicenter, as it were, of bloated U.S. government bureaucracy, practically next door to the folks who conceived of the AIG bailout, exposes him to a lot of "bad idea" inspiration. In most cases, I would tend to agree.

But I've lived and worked in Startup Central for years now, never more than a stone's throw from some of the most cockamamie web concepts ever to get VC funding. All I have to do is glance at the doorways, the signage, the logos on t-shirts and messenger bags - I'm bombarded by new forms of inanity every morning on my walk to work.

So who has the worse ideas? The federal government or the SOMA brain trust? I'm championing the latter, but we'll find out when the dust settles and the last line of code is checked in on May 31st.