Last Thursday morning myself and other Murray State students headed to Birmingham, AL for the AITP Region 7 conference.
Totty and I were on a team competing in the Website Redesign [pdf] category. We had two hours to complete a [very difficult problem] (pdf), which at the bottom noted it was required to be completed in ASP.net! ASP.net! I don’t have any experience in that! Panic ensued. I talked to the guy proctoring the contest, and he made a phone call (while our time was still running) and got the go-ahead for us to use a WAMP setup as long as we could get it going to http://localhost.
Enter WAMP Server which helped us out quite a bit in getting a server setup. I had to stop the IIS service and SQL Server, but after that we were cookin’. Sure, we had a 30 minute disadvantage, but all of that keyboard practice as well as using CSS finally paid off.
Totty was doing the front-end work in CSS/XHTML and I was doing the backend in PHP. It came down to the wire. We didn’t have a single deliverable page until there were 20 minutes left in on the clock. I finished the backend and Totty finished the template. From there, it was combination of the frontend/backend and testing. I honestly don’t remember much after that because I was “in the zone”—but I think it went pretty well.
We got to the awards banquet for the conference on Saturday in the Embassy Suites (where we were staying) and they announced the winners of every other category except for Website Redesign.
I was pissed. They said due to the complexity of the problem as well as a few other factors, they couldn’t fairly evaluate everything until later. People from the conference swore we’d know in two days.
SEVEN days later our faculty advisor got a phone call. We received first place.
UPDATE: Here’s a photo of us ‘accepting first place’—we were encouraged by others to go ahead and take the photo because they thought we’d win. Presumptuous!
