Free Day For All!

SparkFun Electronics held their Free Day event on January 7th, 2010 at 11am EST. I had a few parts that I wanted to order for my senior design project this semester (more coming on that in another post) and was really excited to be able to get those parts for free during the event!

Or maybe not. I hopped into the #Sparkfun chatroom on irc.freenode.net the morning of Free Day to check out what people were chatting about. To my dismay, hours before the event started, there were already almost 700 people in the chatroom. According to Sparkfun’s limitations on the event, only 1,000 $100 orders would be awarded. The numbers were already daunting. I pulled up the Sparkfun website to find their recently updated web servers were already buckling under the load of people preparing their shopping carts. Uh oh. As time neared 11am, the chatroom hit the 1,400 user mark and my hopes of free electronics started to dwindle. Read the rest of this entry »