The tale of how we participated in the hackathons, or Fear and Hate in Silicon Valley



It all started last summer, when my comrade “in arms” felt a little sad, and we decided that we would take part in meaningful and interesting “entertaining developing competitions with programming elements”, or, as they are called damned bourgeois, hackathons. Without hesitation, we turned our eyes to the Valley from Silicon, since there are a lot of events of similar subjects and there is a high chance to find interesting to us. Since then, we have participated in as many as 3 hackathons, thereby losing about 40 hours of sleep. This tale tells about our impressions, the projects we made and the atmosphere around the events described.

By the way, it will be said that now the author of this article lives in the glorious city of San Jose in northern California, and his friend lives in the equally glorious city of Nizhny Novgorod, where the author himself comes from. Your humble servant wound up the thresholds of the events in person, and your comrade successfully participated everywhere remotely, for which he was honored and respected.

For those who took part in more or less serious hackathons, it is no secret that these events are extremely energy-intensive due to limited time and high dynamics. The main idea of ​​the hackathon is to form a team, find an original and interesting idea, and its partial or full implementation in a short period of time without any preliminary preparation for that.

Food hunters




First of all, we ran into a rather apotheotic event, namely, a hackathon organized by the Product Hunt (PH) team . I believe that many people know what this site is and how vast and popular its community is. Here, everyone is just crazy about PH. For the guys, this was the first experience of establishing a hackathon, and they coped with the task, I admit, quite successfully. They chose a theme that is convenient for themselves, namely, they suggested developers to dream up on the topic of using the API of their site, and simply program it on a free topic.

The venue was hosted at Dropbox and Airbnb Y Combinator’s headquarters, adding to the excitement. On top of that, the prizes were a “dream package” for any startup, namely: arranging a meeting with leading valley investment funds, interviews and free coworking hours at Y Combinator. I’ll clarify that the fact that you got on the list of startups Y Combinator practically provides you with a guarantee of excellent investment rounds, provided that you do not leave fast after joining there.



After a little reflection, we came to the conclusion that the most obvious and most likely projects lie in the planes of statistics on posts, the definition of the king of the mountain by some pseudometrics, and other scribes. Nothing sensible came to my mind until I climbed into the drawer of my desk and saw the long-forgotten glasses from Google under a layer of dust. The toad inside me perked up and still offered to breathe a little sense into the very $ 1,500 dollars (many rubles) that I spent secretly from my wife. So the idea of ​​the Google Glass client web service for the Product Hunt website came up. You will say that this is not original and not at all interesting, and I agree, but then we believed that it will be useful to the community (thereby 3 people who use glasses) and will bring some clarity to the PH logo (I’m talking about a cat with glasses ) Then I ran there all evening and exclaimed “Now it makes sense! Make sense! ”



Drumming off the conventional 48 hours and not really sleeping, I waited for my turn and presented (honored) the project , proudly showing it to the founders of PH. They smiled pleasantly, nodded slightly and told me to write a letter to them about access to write to their database (to implement the voting functionality; access was still not given due to unpreparedness) and went to listen to the remaining projects and make a fateful decision. As a result, we were in the top 20 list of projects from 300 submitted around the world, which, in general, was not bad for the first time. And the first project in the villageone enthusiast who came to the end of the first day with his monitor armpit, how to work. The guy obviously tuned in very seriously and eventually broke my ideas about the capabilities of one person and 12 hours of time (provided that he did not cheat and did not do 90% of the project before the hackathon). Other projects seemed rather weak to us, however, it all tastes and color.

After standing for a while and chatting with anyone, I exchanged a few phrases with the founder of PH Rain, saying that they are cool, to which I received an answer that I, “probably”, are also cool. On these wings, I took a couple of large cupcakes to somehow explain to my wife my 2-day absence at home (went for a cupcake), and flew home to sleep.

Apple watch




Autumn has come. Tim Cook admitted that he is proud to be Tim Cook, but without surprising anyone. A little earlier, he announced the miracle of an expensive watch and a platform for developing applications for them, promising the first release of the SDK at sunset in November. Smart people quickly figured out how to do it with PR and cut down a little franklinov and organized the World's First Hackathon for Apple Watch . And we successfully swallowed this bait.

It was obvious that the watch, by itself, was of little use and was best suited for displaying notifications and data in real time. And where to get the data? That's right, now anywhere. The Internet is just breaking from data sources, but I went straight to DataSF.orgto find out what data on the city of San Francisco is available, in what form, and whether it is of interest to the owner of the watch. We found the most interesting data on the police reports, which contained information about crimes with details about the type of crime and its geographical coordinates within the city.

So the idea was born of an application that displays a certain level of criminogenic situation in the user's current location. The city was divided into districts, found the data on the population in each of the districts and determined the simplest criminogenicity metric as the ratio of the number of crimes to the population of the district with the possibility of filtering by type of crime. That is, if you are suddenly afraid to leave your car in the current area, you can always check the level of criminogenicity by filtering only crimes such as autopsy, robbery and car theft. Very convenient for law-abiding watch owners and criminals alike. In short, the situation is Win - Win.

One of the most important conditions is to do everything in beauty. So I threw a few drafts and sent them to mya friend in the city of Sarov . After 12 hours, I received a beautiful frame-by-frame animation for displaying three types of states: everything is calm, a little exciting, and “it’s your time, Valera.”



Further, pretty tormented with the debug of the clock on the simulator, we got some buggy, but still a demo on the simulator. In total, we wrote a web service in python tornado that calculated criminogenicity metrics according to filters and geo-points and issued a REST API. A simple application was implemented on an iPhone, which communicated with our service, then with the clock, and also allowed you to configure filtering by crime. Glance was spinning on the clock, showing all the beauty of the animation and the application displaying the type table - the number of crimes when you click on Glance. All this, in the end, we did not need, because the judges were satisfied with very little: pictures, and animation in the simulator.

Then it was time to pitch for each project . I drummed rather vigorouslyand in the end, the judges gave us the victory in the category of “innovation”. The judges liked that we used “boring” government data and wrapped them in a real life case.



Satisfied with myself, I heard pleasant words about the quality of our project and speeches from some people, and went home to sleep. Later, they sent us one iTunes card with a face value of $ 100, although the site had promised the Apple Store cards (and I even planned to squeeze the card from my companion to buy a new iPhone, but fate decreed otherwise).

Well, sort of like, in the winners. Already good. We are getting to the first place.

Cloud Encoding


The moment has come for the global hackathon from Koding . The startup provides something like a virtual machine with editor and terminal support right in the browser. To make themselves known to the whole world and attract more users, the guys organized a global hackathon with great prizes and sponsors. And here we are. In addition to us, 2,000 teams from all over the world looked at the light . The Russians were also represented there.

Armed with the theme of the problems of the world and visualization, we began to think and scour the search for suitable data. Structuring is nothing better than information about cataclysms (natural and illnesses) in the world we did not find, so we decided to beautifully visualize the whole thing using the Web GL stack. Incidentally, shortly before that, I came acrosschrome experiments and this pretty ball . We got this:



In addition, we made a cut of the Beyonce clip and put this clip to the music from the same clip. From all this we made a start page. And, it seems to me, it turned out pretty touching. At least, my wife, having looked at the final version, let out a tear (or did she see my code from the corner of her eye?).



This was a rather complicated hackathon for us, since we had no experience with the Three.js library and we had to spend a lot of time studying existing examples. In addition, we really wanted to do well and efficiently, which played a cruel joke with us, forcing us to linger and polish very insignificant details.

5 minutes before the end, we made the last commit, quickly filled out the form and sent it to the court. Do not judge strictly, but here it is our creation - http://dserkin.koding.io .

At first, the results were promised four days later, that is, on Thursday, then they were postponed to Monday, and yesterday they finally (?) Were postponed four days ahead again. At the same time, they organized a public vote , which, firstly, requires Facebook accounts for voters and, secondly, clearly does not contribute to the spread of justice around the world.

Finally, we came to the point for which I wrote all this and tried so hard! I am not against the markup in my favor, and I urge you, Khabrovites, to leave their mark on this intergalactic hackathon. See the full list of projectsand evaluate them in fairness. But, since there are a hundred of them, I’ll just say that our team is called Red Alert and our favorite number is 10. Arrange for them a habraeffect!

Voting is over and we went to the final round! We express our gratitude to all who care!

Thank you and hello everyone from sunny California!


Also popular now: