I reached Dhoby Ghaut at 9.05am because Teck Hwee said to meet the day before at 9.15am. As expected, I was the earliest, and Hwa Swee arrived about 10 minutes later.

We went to Starbucks and got a drink (Vanilla Latte for me), sat there and talked about what’s going to happen next semester in school. :S Yan Qin, Yi Long, Tom, Vijay, Harish and Teck Hwee arrived and we all walked to SMU SIS building.

Met Li ying outside the building. She forgot her laptop adapter and we waited till about 10.30am before heading up to register for the Code Xtreme Apps competition.

Upon receiving our package, we immediately took everything out and looked through it. The theme of the competition was similar to what we’d guessed it would be, and hence went on to discuss what we could do with the theme. We also realised that our group’s room number was invalid and went on to clarify with the NUS professor what it should be. Haha.

The competition started right after lunch. LY, YL and I realised that we were sitting in front of Vijay’s team until they got reallocated to another room. THEN, about 30 minutes into the competition, the “helper” told us to move to another room. -_-” We’d already settled down into our places and started coding already! Was super annoyed and irritated by that, but nevermind. At least the seats we were allocated to in the other room was more spacious. And the room we were allocated to was the same as Vijay’s team and Nicole’s team. 🙂

Encountered loads of problems thoughout the competition as YL and I haven’t coded in Java for almost half a year (and what we’d coded 6 months ago were mapplets). So poor LY had to help us. I tried not to build onto her stress level by looking at the Java and Google GWT APIs. One of the functions that I was supposed to do couldn’t work out in the end and ended up working on another function.

Time flew by very quickly. By the time of submission, even though we weren’t able to complete all our functions, at least the important ones were done. We encountered deployment problems. I’m guessing the reason for it would most likely be the fact that the project wasn’t created properly at the beginning. >.< Oh well. Luckily for us, the organisers allowed us to submit our files in a normal folder. 🙂 We were the last team to get judged. Comments from the judges were that what we did was interactive and different from others. They tried to get us to "sell" our project, but due to the lack of sleep, we failed that part. Lol. But was quite alright in the end. So well, the weekend was fruitful as I got to learn a lot more about Google WTK as compared to the stuff that I'd read up at home about it. Learnt a lot about using Eclipse as well (though I still am not used to using it). Though I felt that perhaps this competition should be divided into categories. Even though Ruby on Rails, Google Maps, Google Mashup and GWT are new technology, there are many professionals or people out there who are already well-versed at it. A lot of us are newbies to these technology and we would definitely not win or cannot even compare to their standard in a competition like this. Even though the organisers emphasized that it is the idea that is important in this competition, it is afterall a programming competition. Maybe by having different categories in this competition, the top few of each category could have a second round of judging and the best would be able to win the Google trip or something? Just my 2 cents worth on this. 🙂