Deep disappointment or the first hackathon of the Moscow Government

    So, today I want to tell you about one event that occurred on May 29 in the territory of Red October. I will try to share a purely subjective opinion that has developed in our team.

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    Day 1. First impressions


    Early in the morning I went to Moscow to quickly catch my first hackathon in my life, which I accidentally found out when I looked at the API Moscow website. He once really helped me write my first Windows Store app. On the Hackathon page was a fairly detailed description of the event with a clear schedule and a good prize. The hackathon was divided into 2 stages. The first stage, at which the best applications were to be selected for further participation, was scheduled for the 29th, and the second was planned in 2 weeks. The only thing that confused me (as it turned out later, quite justifiably) was the large number of officials on the juryimage

    Well, what can I do, the Hackathon still runs the government, but the lack of experts in the field of mobile development (or at least information about the availability of this skill) made me very upset, because the words that many of us arise when it comes to officials came up immediately in my head.

    But back to the hackathon. Nothing boded ill. My experience with the Moscow API was limited to only one data set, and although I had problems, I thought that they were not very widespread. The hackathon presentation was opened with the words “Uh. Well, first of all, you need to thank Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin that he issued a decree that we should begin to work, ”and so on. When it came to questions, several developers at once, breaking away, began to ask about when they would do standardization of the data, because, for example, “city” is written in one set, “gorod” in the other, and street names are often there are errors, not to mention the format of the phone number. To which, as expected, the answer was that they are already correcting this, etc. There was also a question, when will they be able to disclose the project data Autocode. It is interesting here that for the first time this question was generally ignored, and when someone, deliberately highlighting this moment, repeated the question again, the answering person hesitated and said that he would discuss this in private.

    Also in the description of the hackathon it was said that we will present our projects, which the organizers have successfully forgotten about.
    In general, at the beginning of the day these were the only things that were in doubt, but still the picture as a whole remained quite attractive. I accidentally met a team that turned out to be from my university, we decided that we would work together. Total: 2 android developers, 1 designer for them. Well, I decided to help them by writing a port for Windows Phone.

    Food. Hunger. timetable

    Again, I was not at other hackathons, and it is difficult for me to judge about food, but at conferences in which I happened to participate, they fed much better. It all consists in the fact that you are fed like 3 times a day, I don’t remember exactly, because the first day we did not get out of the conference room at all. If you are late, then, congratulations, your stomach will wait until next time. The quantity could not please either. Heck. It's probably too stupid to find fault with food, but, let's say, I got the impression that the phrase “A good developer is a hungry developer” was taken literally by the organizers. The food itself was tasty, but, again, not enough.

    Evening. Night.

    Honestly, there’s nothing special to say. We were often visited by girls (no, no, they are from the organizers) who were interested in what project we were doing, etc. Other participants also dropped in a couple of times. I was very worried when I found out that someone also writes under Windows Phone, and was very afraid to make my team idiots, but, as it turned out, in vain.

    But I want to highlight one moment when the guys from the jury came to us and asked if we had technical difficulties. And we, in turn, bombarded them with questions, to which they answered that almost everything we want to do needs to be implemented through another API. EMP, in which, according to the presenter, 80% of Muscovites are registered. It is a pity that none of us knew almost anything about this API, except for its existence. Well, nothing, gained strength and continued to work.

    And it was all pretty hard. Almost without interruptions, and with constant refueling by power engineers, which were distributed free of charge by the girl at the stand.
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    Someone was leaving home, someone, like us, was immersed in code throughout the night. Generally speaking, these are wonderful emotions when you can write code in a team. For me it was new and specifically for the sake of this wonderful feeling, I advise you to definitely try to go to a hackathon, if you have not been there.

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    But now it’s already 5 in the morning, and in the IDE the devil knows what and somewhere inside comes the realization that the code is already completely meaningless, and simple problems are solved by crutches and take a lot of time. A clear sign that it’s time to go to sleep. Alarm clock at 8 am - and go. One developer followed my example, and the remaining guys decided to lie down in an hour.

    Morning. First stage

    Waking up 5 minutes before the alarm rings, you already feel such a surge of strength in yourself that it seems like you slept forever. Shifting from foot to foot, you go to wash, you take a glass of coffee, because from one smell, the power engineer was already starting to feel sick, cookies (this was the only thing you could always take) and move towards the hall where your faithful laptop lies and waits for you to continue working. The guys are sleeping. Through a hazy look, as if you had a great time yesterday with a good bottle of alcohol, you look at your code and are completely at a loss from your last lines.

    Breakfast. I ate, but, as usual, still hungry. After 3 hours, I contact the best designer in the world for Windows Phone, I write to him that I urgently need a design for several pages, an icon, a splash screen and other delights. You begin to feel an influx of excitement, and you forget about the dream instantly. Especially, you should see the eyes of our designer at 9 in the morning. It's like the eye of Sauron, which ... What am I talking about. Final touches, somehow introducing the design, fixing bugs, etc. Due to the fact that we did not have access to the EMP API (it takes about a week to register the developers), we could not access our main treasure, so we had to make a tour version of the main functions, which, however, the jury did not bother .

    So, the designer completes the presentation, which surprisingly turned out to be much better than the static pictures of the others. We are testing the latest versions, of course, we find some errors exactly before the change, but by a miracle we fix them and send the presentation to the mail of the computer from which the launch will take place. We distribute the phones to the jury, our designer magician goes to the front, gets some tart questions, and the audience laughs. Well, everything was as planned. I was very disappointed that we were the only application (here we deanonymized) that did not offer any monetization, but simply put forward the idea of ​​“Application for Muscovites”. The jury did not cause any enthusiasm, but in general, anyway, the main thing is that users are satisfied.

    Among the jury there was one representative from each of SONY and ORACLE. Among the participants (teams were in the region of 28), approximately 40% were low-grade applications, as developed mainly alone, or in a very small team. Someone went out, very shy, some freshmen from the HSE, who three together managed to make some kind of prototype, where the route on the map was laid out with a straight line a la helicopter, someone made just disgusting applications that could not really understand anything.

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    But I just paid a lot of attention to the Windows Phone developers and, due to a lot of excitement, I was too critical. Another 40% were just good applications that deserve to compete for the title of best, but provided that the leaders make mistakes. And finally, 20% of really high-quality applications that can turn the usual services and bring something new (no, I do not attribute our application to this share).

    First round result

    The Citigram application won, which you can easily find in Google. I don’t want to express our general opinion about this application, because it will look like an attempt to omit the winner, but in short, the idea is, of course, great, but it disappointed the full copy-paste of the code that Durov’s developers wrote so hard.

    We won a prize, a prize from ORACLE - two certificates for free passage of any courses, or something like that. There are four of us, and two certificates. I
    I’m not particularly interested in this company, I don’t write for Android, and I don’t use Java, it didn’t make sense to me, moreover, the certificate was aimed at graduates, which will soon be all the guys from our team, except me. But since we are used to the fact that in a decent society you can always agree, we decided to go up and ask about the possibility of 4 certificates. They quickly agreed and asked to send their data to such and such an address and, most likely, they will give a certificate to everyone.

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    Passed or not?

    To say that we were worried is to say nothing. These goosebumps, when they call a team and ask to go out, get a certificate, it’s a feeling that everything, the finish line, now everything depends on us ... No, there it was. The leader comes out and says that everyone goes to the second stage. Bravo! Simply put, they tell you that all your attempts were in vain and we did not choose any of the best, so go and work all of you, maybe see you in two weeks. Well? In fact, everything, of course, was not so scary, but we generally had it then, because We won cool certificates.

    No really. We didn’t care. We were full of energy and ready to continue development.

    But something went wrong

    I return home, get enough sleep and immediately drop in motivation, I continue to refine the application, making it at least beautiful and convenient. In the meantime, an application for a developer account has already been sent to EMP.

    But there is something worth telling right away. The fact is that any action that you want to perform with the EMF will take time to verify. This is not some Vkontaktik, where you need to register and just start using the convenient API with a sandbox, fu, so normal people do not.

    Total:
    4-5 daysto send me a message that they have already sent me the password for the account. As it turned out, once upon a time I still registered there. Password recovery link? What for. Where is it better to get the date of the message and look in your mail for a letter from them with a password. Think it was that simple, huh? Logged in, registered, waited 5 days and started using the service? Well, no, this is not safe, because we must check everyone who wants to use our precious data.

    3-4 days to register the application. The application is registered, cheers! Guys, we have a week left to do everything, let's hurry up! Now, only I will check how the personal account and the documentation look there. Surely, our guys from the government tried.

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    Just a moment. Sending a password in a GET request. Seriously? Imagine your face now. Here we were with such a face almost all the time while leafing through the documentation. Okay, guys, we understand everything, but we have to complete this application. Everyone agreed and continued to work. I am sending the first request. In reply:

    {"errorCode":403,"errorMessage":"Core::Authorization failed."}
    


    Wait a second, what is it. Problem with authorization? It’s strange. It seems to have done everything right. What say Need to request access to specific APIs? Good, but I tried to just log in. What? To do this, you also need to request access. Hm. Well, where to click, otherwise I can’t wait.

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    Okay, if without this pun, then it all ended up taking 3 days to access the API . But we are already experienced guys, so according to our formula, you need to take this number and add 2-3 days to it . So it was. Now attention.

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    At exactly midnight Sunday, all of our API requests get permission. Well, I think the idea is clear.

    Chaos


    Here we understand that there is complete chaos. They write to us in the mail, in a friendly manner asking how we are doing (mailing to everyone) and asking to ask questions. We told them, asked to expedite the confirmation of the API (at this point, we have not received it yet). In response, they are silent. We write to those guys who came to us on the first day and listened to questions. They say that they cannot affect the speed of verification. Well, yes, the program itself will not switch to the "Disable verification simulation" mode. And also we ask them to tell us the e-mail from which the application for Windows Phone will be downloaded, so that I can instantly put it in the form of a BETA version, because time is very short and we do not have time (verification takes about 5 business days). They say that e-mail will be sent soon. To speed up the process, I sent a private message to one of the organizers, where he explained in detail the situation that because of the time we spent sitting still and waiting for us to be given access, I now do not have time to put it in the Store. We urgently begin to look for a way out. One developer from the team recalls that everything that is transmitted via their APIs is GET requests, takes out a sniffer and sends us the keys ... Use other people's tokens to take part in their own competition ... In my opinion, this is absurd.

    Total

    That organizer read the message that very evening, but still did not deign to answer it. The guys from the e-mail correspondence did not send me an e-mail. All my strength on smarka. We were not given any test data to test the API. We posted some Android version, but without a normal API (there were encoding problems, nothing talking about errors, and many more) this is essentially a dummy application. The same goes for Windows Phone. The deadline was postponed 2 or 3 times, I don’t remember. Only very recently did we find out who won the hackathon. We were not contacted regarding certificates, although we sent a general letter several times.

    Of course, there was a lot of good, like an excellent conference room with comfortable chairs, a big board, but all the good impressions were mainly from the atmosphere itself, rather than from specific actions. I can’t say anything good about the second stage.

    PS

    I immediately want to apologize for the errors, which are so many here (write about them in PM, please) and too much criticism, but this is my personal opinion, which coincides with the opinion of the team. I just described it in the first person. Happiness to all, participate in hackathons.

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