Mobile #gamification with Appcelerator Titanium and Javascript. (Part 1)
We recently held a gamification hackathon at Bunchball, and the results were amazing. Kasey McCurdy, superstar Bunchball front-end engineer, built a gamified mobile app in oh, about 18 hours. And now he’s letting you in on his secrets at WorkWithKasey.com. Want to work with engineers like Kasey? Then come Work For Bunchball.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! (My first experience with mobile)
A few years ago, I got to write my first mobile app using Objective-C and XCode. It was an incredibly simple app for the best Pitchman in the land, Billy Mays. The one thing I remember was the learning curve. To effectively develop for iOS, you need to understand a vast ecosystem of technologies and concepts that involved more than just Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, and XCode.
The concepts are still important, and you’ll learn them later, but they can certainly be intimidating when you just want to get started with a simple (or as complex as you want) app.
All I wanted to do was write a simple app to enable people to outfit themselves with the legendary beard and blue shirt, so that they might feel an ounce of his awesomeness. It took me 3 months of hacking away at night in my free time…thats like a year in internet time.
Now, I don’t want this to sound like I am or was afraid to learn something new, or that the iOS platform is impossible or not developer-friendly. In fact, I tend to sink my teeth into anything new and exciting, and I still think there are many scenarios where it makes sense to go with platform-specific languages and frameworks. The rub was that just that to get the simplest of apps up and running was like climbing Everest just to see if you like snow…there might just be easier and more efficient ways to do it.
For a few years, I hacked away with Objective-C and never really fell in love with it. Then Titanium from Appcelerator came along…
#Gamification of Jive Software - Kasey McCurdy, star application engineer at Bunchball, blogs about how we built Nitro for Jive in less than 3 weeks. Read the whole story at WorkWithKasey.com.
A week or so after our rush from winning the Salesforce AppQuest competition, a small contingent of Bunchballers found ourselves hunkered down deep in an underground bunker beneath Jive Headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. Our mission: come up with an awesome app that solves a problem for Jive customers using the Jive Apps platform and the power of Nitro.
Now the fun part: this app will be showcased at JiveWorld 2011…in 17 days. I repeat, this yet-undefined app has to be designed, coded, tested and working in 17 days.
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At Bunchball, we’re building a team of “10x” people: people who can run fast, think creatively, and go deep in one area but contribute everywhere. And we think the best way to attract the kind of people we want is to show them exactly who they’ll be working with.
To that end, this week we’re launching a set of blogs from employees in engineering, client services and sales so that you can get a sense for the people, their personalities, and their work. The only rule they were given was “don’t be stupid”.
To kick it off, let me introduce you to Kasey McCurdy, the leader of our offshore (well, Iowa) development team. We first met Kasey when he was working for a customer of ours, Meredith, on their Nitro implementation. We kept in touch, and over time what started out as mutual affection blossomed into full-blown love, so he joined Bunchball and has been killing it ever since. He even made this video, just for you. You can read more about Kasey and what he’s up to at Bunchball at http://www.workwithkasey.com
Stay tuned for more blog launches this week! - rajat
btw - this could be you!
Bunchball’s Kasey McCurdy (Application Engineer, Bacon Connoisseur) and Rajat Paharia (Founder, Code Monkey) welcome their new best friends, Salesforce.com mascots Chatty and Saasy, at Dreamforce 2011.
Gamification news, tactics, case studies and more. The official blog of Bunchball. 
