Demo Day Done

A month before Y Combinator Demo Day, I resolved to be as productive as possible for 30 days, since they say that the time leading up to Demo Day is one of the most highly leveraged timespans you can go through. They were right, and it was worth it. Demo Day was on Tuesday, and it was epic.

Having been working mainly on CodeCombat's competitive multiplayer during YC and finally launching it widely last week, it delighted me to see it immediately get picked up on Slashdot, TechCrunch, Hacker News, reddit, and other sites, and for the leaderboards to explode, and for there to be hundreds of players I now can't even beat at my own game. I'm also pleased (but somewhat alarmed) at how much time I'm now spending playing CodeCombat, trying to destroy my own users and reclaim my programming throne. And I am not above dirty tricks (watch the strafing in the upper left).

So how much work did I get done?

I averaged 11.32 hours of work per day, or 79.23 per week, for 30 days. Not recommended for general productivity purposes, but great for growing a website fast when it counts. The other CodeCombat guys and our GitHub army were also swarming smoothly last month. Trying to find more balance now that I'm back town to a relaxed 60 hours of work per week. (Why do I work so much? Because it's important, and because I only have so much badass work time left before I produce infants.)

I gotta say, though, it was not nearly as much fun as the 120-hour workweek.

I had another epic dream for another novel last night. What's with working hard and having these dreams?

So yeah, that's why I wasn't blogging. I now resume all my regular pursuits, including improving this website.

Nick

Hacking on CodeCombat, a multiplayer programming game for learning to code. Mastermind behind Skritter, the most powerful Chinese character learning app.

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