zombievirus

While I was at Optaros I got to work on a prototype for a startup. It was pretty rad. The people were excellent, I loved their idea and I loved my prototype.

Basically what I made was a drag and drop tool you could use to make store windows that people could shop off of. I feel like it’s ok that I write about this now given that I found a press release about their upcoming launch that says pretty much the same thing.

Under the assumption that I’d be the one building this site after the Blueprinting phase, I made my prototype with reusable code. I loved the product, so I tested the heck out of that prototype because I was constantly playing with it. It was really fun.

And here is where the bubble bursts. We did not get the go ahead to build the site. Originally we were going to give them a site which they could look at, and use to show investors, but not my actual prototype code. The logic being that this was usable code and they paid for a prototype. Well then Amazon went down and lost EVERYTHING. One of the members on our team zipped up my code and send it on over to the client, or ex-client, whatever. It was already pretty much over at that point.

Last week I got a DM from a coworker at Optaros about the startup’s new agency and their little press release about how awesome the product is and how they totally just build this super awesome window creation experience. They also linked another project similar that was affiliated with the startup.

Sooo… yeah they used my code. The HTML, the Javascript, all of it was there, comments and all. Even the comments that said “This is a total hack, do not go live with this” were there. I know that as soon as it was passed off, it belonged to the client and they could do whatever they wished with it. So they gave it to the next guy, and the next guy used it all and stamped their name on it.

Honestly, I kinda felt dirty. Here is this agency I have zero affiliation with taking credit for something I made. What was worse was that I made the whole thing in 2 weeks, I tried my best to make it beautiful and when I looked at the code they added, it was about 500 lines of shit that could have been done in one. I AM NOT EXAGGERATING WHEN I SAY THAT. There is actually a chunk of code in that file that is well over half the document, that could have been done in one line of code. Which leads me to believe the agency doesn’t have the team savvy enough to build a tool like that. Also the rest of the site was pretty much an HTTP request nightmare.

The silver lining is YAY SOMETHING I MADE IS LIVE NOW! I can be happy about that. It was a good prototype, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was just a prototype. There was a lot of it that needed to be changed before going live and I never got to do it. It’s not as beautiful as I would have done it if we got the chance to make it.

I think it’s funny that when I help build a prototype hoping that the client will use the code, they don’t (Finishline) and when I build a prototype where I wouldn’t want the client to use my code, they do. It just could have been so much better and more polished.