Startup Weekend 5

Posting now from the 4th floor of Broderick Tower in Detroit, where Grand Circus is hosting Startup Weekend 5.
The premise behind Startup weekend is to get a whole bunch of people with ideas for startup companies or products--or people interesting in helping such a person--together for the entire weekend.  Everyone has the opportunity to make a 60-second pitch for their idea, after which everyone mixes around and talks about the ideas.  Each attendee can vote for up to 3 startup ideas, and several of the most popular ones get approval to move forward.  Everyone breaks into teams--one for each idea that advanced.  That's Friday night.
After that, it's a mad rush of development, market research, and creative brainstorming and content creation, with the goal of producing a "minimum viable product" before Sunday evening.  In short, a group of about 5 people try to make a baseline, but usable and/or promising, product in less than 48 hours (the entire event is 54 hours long from start to finish.)  On the final afternoon/evening, teams do a 5-minute pitch for a panel of judges, answer some questions, and wait for the votes.  Winning teams get donated prize/resources (like a $100 credit for Amazon Web Services) and the top product gets free office space for a year, plus is entered to compete against other top teams worldwide, with some significant venture capital for the worldwide winner.
Needless to say, making a product in 2.5 days is a big task.  I'm here as a front-end web developer, and inadvertently ended up as the lone developer on my team!

Now, keep in mind that I have yet to finish my first development class.  I wrote my first line of HTML about 7 weeks ago. I was expecting to be an assistant, not an entire dev team.

In a perverse way, this actually worked out in my group's favor: since our technical abilities were limited, we didn't get too ambitious--from the start we knew that we couldn't produce a fully-functional product (I know nothing about back-end development yet--I'm going to start trying to learn Ruby on Rails in the next week or so).  Instead, we focused on making a demo of what the product would look like.  That took me most of the day on Saturday.
Now, on Sunday around noon, we're one of 2 teams with our tech finished.  Other teams who were more ambitious are still scrambling and stressing out, but today's been fairly relaxed for us.  I've been basically screwing around on my own unrelated web development all morning.

Startup Weekend is a heck of an experience--a powerful mix of creativity, knowledge, sweat, stress, sleep deprivation, and lots and lots of caffeine.  If you're even a little bit interested, check it out--it's not free, but it's not expensive either, and it's a pretty unique experience.