Deep disappointment or the First Hakaton of the Moscow Government
So, today I want to tell you about a single event that occurred on May 29 in the territory of Red October. I will try to share a purely subjective opinion that has developed among our team.
Early in the morning I went to Moscow to quickly make it to my first hackathon in my life, which I accidentally found out when I looked at the API Moscow site. He once helped me a lot to write my first application for the Windows Store. On the page of the Hackathon there was a rather detailed description of the event with a clear timetable and a good prize. Hackathon was divided into 2 stages. The first stage, in which the best applications for further participation were to be chosen, was scheduled for the 29th, and the second was planned in 2 weeks. The only thing that (as it later turned out, quite reasonably) embarrassed me, is the large number of officials on the jury
')
Well, what to do, Hakaton still conducts the government, but the lack of experts in the field of mobile development (or at least information about the availability of this skill) I was very upset because the words that many of us have come to mind immediately when it comes to officials.
But back to the hackathon. Nothing foreshadowed trouble. My experience with the Moscow API was limited to only one set of data, and even though I had problems, I thought that they were not widely used. The hackathon presentation was opened with the words “Uh. Well, first of all, you need to thank Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin for decreeing that we should start working ”and so on. When it came to questions, several developers at once, struggling, began to ask about when they would already standardize data, because, for example, they write “city” in one set, and “gorod” in the other, and often street names There are errors, not to mention the phone number format. To which, as one would expect, there was an answer that they are already correcting it, etc. There was also a question, when will they be able to disclose the data of the Autocode project. The interesting thing here is that the first time this question was ignored altogether, and when someone, specifically highlighting this moment, again repeated the question, the respondent hesitated and said that he would discuss it in private.
Also in the description of the hackathon it was said that we will present our projects, which the organizers have successfully forgotten.
Generally speaking, at the beginning of the day these were the only things that were in doubt, but the picture as a whole remained rather 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, to them 1 designer. Well, I decided to help them by writing a port for Windows Phone.
Again, I was not at other hackathons, and I find it difficult to judge about the food, but at the conferences in which I had the opportunity to participate, they fed much better. It’s all about feeding you 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 the next time. The number also could not please. Heck. This is 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,” the organizers took literally. The food itself was tasty, but, again, not enough.
Honestly, there is nothing special to say here. We were often visited by girls (no, no, they were 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 was also writing under Windows Phone, and was very afraid to turn my team into an idiot, but, as it turned out, it was in vain.
But I want to single out one moment when the guys from the jury came to us and asked if we had any technical difficulties. And we, in turn, bombarded them with questions, to which we were told that practically everything we want to do needs to be implemented through another API. EMP, in which, according to the lead, 80% of Muscovites are registered. It is a pity that none of us practically knew nothing about this API, except for its existence. Well, nothing, gain strength and continued to work.
And it was all pretty hard. Practically without interruptions, and with constant refueling by power engineers who were distributed by the girl at the stand for free.
Someone was leaving home, someone, like us, plunged into the code throughout the night. Generally speaking, these are wonderful emotions when you can write code in a team. For me it was a novelty and specifically for the sake of this wonderful feeling, I advise you to definitely try to go to the hackathon, if you have not been there yet.
But now it is 5 am on the clock, and in the IDE, the devil knows that and somewhere inside comes the realization that the code is already completely meaningless, and simple problems are solved with 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.
When you wake up 5 minutes before the alarm bell, you already feel such a surge of strength in yourself that it seems as if you slept for eternity. Shifting from foot to foot, you go to wash, take a cup of coffee, because from one smell, the energetics were already beginning to feel sick, cookies (this is the only thing that could always be taken) and move to the side of the hall, where your faithful laptop lies and waits while you continue working. The guys are sleeping. Through a hazy look, as if you had a great time yesterday with a good bottle of liquor, look at your code and come to a complete bewilderment 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 am writing to him that I urgently need the design of several pages, an icon, splashscreen and other delights. You begin to feel an influx of excitement, and you forget about a dream instantly. Especially, you should see the eyes of our designer at 9 in the morning. It's like Sauron's eye, which ... What am I talking about? Finishing touches, somehow introducing designs, fixing bugs, etc. Due to the fact that we did not have access to the API EMP (developer registration takes about a week), we could not access our main treasure, so we had to do a tour version of the main functions, which, however, did not bother the jury .
So, the designer draws a presentation, which surprisingly turned out much better than the static images from the rest. We test the latest versions, of course, we find some errors exactly before the delivery, but miraculously correct them and send the presentation to the mail of the computer from which the launch will occur. We distribute phones to the jury, our wizard-designer goes to the front, gets some tart questions, makes the audience laugh. Well, everything is as planned. I was very disappointed that we were the only application (here we were de-anonymized), which did not offer any monetization, but simply put the idea “An application for Muscovites”. This did not cause any delight in the jury, but in general, it’s all the same, the main thing is that the users are happy.
Among the jury was one representative from SONY and ORACLE. Among the participants (there were 28 teams), about 40% were low-grade applications, since developed mainly alone or in a very small team. Someone went out, very shy, some freshmen from HSE, who three managed to make some kind of prototype, where the route on the map was laid with a straight line a la helicopter, someone made just disgusting applications that didn’t really know anything.
But I just paid a lot of attention to the Windows Phone developers and, due to a lot of excitement, was too critical. Another 40% were just good apps that deserve to compete for the title of the best, but on condition that the leaders make mistakes. Well, finally, 20% of really high-quality applications that are able to turn the usual services and bring something new (no, I don’t attribute our application to this share).
Win application Citigram, which you can easily find in Google. Now I don’t want to express our general opinion about this application, since it will look like an attempt to omit the winner, but if in brief, the idea is, of course, excellent, but it disappointed the complete copy-paste of the code that the developers of Durov so zealously wrote.
We won a prize, a prize from ORACLE - two certificates for free completion of any courses, or something like that. There are four of us, and there are two certificates. I
I’m not particularly interested in this company, I don’t write for Android, but I don’t use Java, it didn’t make sense to me, besides, the certificate was aimed at graduates who all the guys from our team, except me, will soon become. 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 would distribute the certificate to everyone.
To say that we were worried is to say nothing. These goosebumps, when they call the team and ask to go out, get a certificate, this feeling that everything, the final stretch, now everything depends on us ... There was no such thing. The presenter comes out and says that everyone goes to the second stage. Bravo! Simply put, you are told that all your attempts were in vain and we did not choose any of the best, so go all of you to work, maybe see you in two weeks. Well? In fact, everything, of course, was not so scary, but we generally had a damn about it, because we won cool certificates.
No, really. We didn’t care. We were full of energy and ready to continue development.
I return home, I take off sleep and immediately on drops of motivation, I continue to refine the application, making it at least beautiful and convenient. Meanwhile, the application for a developer account has already been sent to the EMP.
But it is worth something to tell immediately. The fact is that any action that you want to perform with the EMP will require time to check. This is not some Vkontaktik where you need to register and just start using a convenient API with a sandbox, fu, so normal people do not.
Total:
4-5 days to send me a message that I have already sent a password for the account. As it turned out, once upon a time I did register there. Link to password recovery? What for. Where better to get the date of the message and look in your mail for a letter from them with a password. You think it was that simple, right? Logged in, registered, waited 5 days and started using the service? Well, no, it's not safe, because we have to 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! Now, only I will check how my personal account looks and the documentation there. Surely, our guys from the government have tried.
Wait a second. Sending a password in a GET request. Seriously? Imagine your face now. With such a face, we were almost all the time while we were browsing through the documentation. Okay, guys, we all understand, but we have to finish this application. All agreed and continued to work. I send the first request. In reply:
Just a second, what is this. Problem with authorization? Strange. It seems to do everything right. What do you say? Need to request access to specific APIs? Good, but I just tried to log in. What? For this, you also need to request access. Hm Well, where to click, but then I can not wait.
Well, if without this pun, then everything ended up in order to access the API, you need 3 days . But we are already experienced guys, so according to our formula, we need to take this number and add 2-3 days to it. So it was. And now attention.
Exactly at midnight on Sunday, all our requests to the API get permission. Well, I think the thought is clear.
Here we understand that there is complete chaos. They write to us by mail, in a friendly way asking how we are doing (sending out to everyone) and asking to ask questions. We told them, asked to speed up the confirmation of the API (at this point, we have not received it yet). In response, they are silent. We write to those guys that came to us on the first day and listened to questions. They say that they can not affect the speed of verification. Well, yes, the program will not switch itself into the “Disable Test Simulation” mode. And also ask them to tell us the e-mail, from which they will download the application for Windows Phone, so that I can instantly put in the form of a BETA version, since the time is very short and we do not have time (the check takes about 5 working days). They say they will send e-mail soon. To speed up the process, I sent a personal message to one of the organizers, where I explained in detail the situation that, because of the time we spent sitting in one place and waiting until we were given access, I no longer have time to upload it to the Store. We urgently begin to look for a way out. One developer from the team remembers that all that is passed through their API is GET requests, gets a sniffer and sends us the keys ... Use someone else's tokens to take part in their own competition ... In my opinion, this is absurd.
That organizer read the message that evening, but did not deign to reply to it until now. The guys with the e-mail correspondence did not send me an e-mail. All my strength on smarka. We were not given any test data for testing the API. We put out some Android version, but without a normal API (there were problems with the encoding, no other bugs, and many more) this is essentially a dummy application. Same for Windows Phone. Deadline was transferred times 2 or 3, I do not remember. Only recently we learned who won the hackathon. We have not been contacted about the certificates, although we sent a general letter several times.
Of course, there were a lot of good things, such as a great conference room with comfortable seating, a large blackboard, but all the good impressions were mostly from the atmosphere itself rather than from concrete actions. About the second stage of good, I can not say anything.
I immediately want to apologize for the mistakes that there are so many (write about them in HP, 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. All happiness, participate in hakatonah.
Day 1. First impressions
Early in the morning I went to Moscow to quickly make it to my first hackathon in my life, which I accidentally found out when I looked at the API Moscow site. He once helped me a lot to write my first application for the Windows Store. On the page of the Hackathon there was a rather detailed description of the event with a clear timetable and a good prize. Hackathon was divided into 2 stages. The first stage, in which the best applications for further participation were to be chosen, was scheduled for the 29th, and the second was planned in 2 weeks. The only thing that (as it later turned out, quite reasonably) embarrassed me, is the large number of officials on the jury
')
Well, what to do, Hakaton still conducts the government, but the lack of experts in the field of mobile development (or at least information about the availability of this skill) I was very upset because the words that many of us have come to mind immediately when it comes to officials.
But back to the hackathon. Nothing foreshadowed trouble. My experience with the Moscow API was limited to only one set of data, and even though I had problems, I thought that they were not widely used. The hackathon presentation was opened with the words “Uh. Well, first of all, you need to thank Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin for decreeing that we should start working ”and so on. When it came to questions, several developers at once, struggling, began to ask about when they would already standardize data, because, for example, they write “city” in one set, and “gorod” in the other, and often street names There are errors, not to mention the phone number format. To which, as one would expect, there was an answer that they are already correcting it, etc. There was also a question, when will they be able to disclose the data of the Autocode project. The interesting thing here is that the first time this question was ignored altogether, and when someone, specifically highlighting this moment, again repeated the question, the respondent hesitated and said that he would discuss it in private.
Also in the description of the hackathon it was said that we will present our projects, which the organizers have successfully forgotten.
Generally speaking, at the beginning of the day these were the only things that were in doubt, but the picture as a whole remained rather 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, to them 1 designer. Well, I decided to help them by writing a port for Windows Phone.
Food. Hunger. schedule
Again, I was not at other hackathons, and I find it difficult to judge about the food, but at the conferences in which I had the opportunity to participate, they fed much better. It’s all about feeding you 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 the next time. The number also could not please. Heck. This is 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,” the organizers took literally. The food itself was tasty, but, again, not enough.
Evening. Night.
Honestly, there is nothing special to say here. We were often visited by girls (no, no, they were 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 was also writing under Windows Phone, and was very afraid to turn my team into an idiot, but, as it turned out, it was in vain.
But I want to single out one moment when the guys from the jury came to us and asked if we had any technical difficulties. And we, in turn, bombarded them with questions, to which we were told that practically everything we want to do needs to be implemented through another API. EMP, in which, according to the lead, 80% of Muscovites are registered. It is a pity that none of us practically knew nothing about this API, except for its existence. Well, nothing, gain strength and continued to work.
And it was all pretty hard. Practically without interruptions, and with constant refueling by power engineers who were distributed by the girl at the stand for free.
Someone was leaving home, someone, like us, plunged into the code throughout the night. Generally speaking, these are wonderful emotions when you can write code in a team. For me it was a novelty and specifically for the sake of this wonderful feeling, I advise you to definitely try to go to the hackathon, if you have not been there yet.
But now it is 5 am on the clock, and in the IDE, the devil knows that and somewhere inside comes the realization that the code is already completely meaningless, and simple problems are solved with 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
When you wake up 5 minutes before the alarm bell, you already feel such a surge of strength in yourself that it seems as if you slept for eternity. Shifting from foot to foot, you go to wash, take a cup of coffee, because from one smell, the energetics were already beginning to feel sick, cookies (this is the only thing that could always be taken) and move to the side of the hall, where your faithful laptop lies and waits while you continue working. The guys are sleeping. Through a hazy look, as if you had a great time yesterday with a good bottle of liquor, look at your code and come to a complete bewilderment 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 am writing to him that I urgently need the design of several pages, an icon, splashscreen and other delights. You begin to feel an influx of excitement, and you forget about a dream instantly. Especially, you should see the eyes of our designer at 9 in the morning. It's like Sauron's eye, which ... What am I talking about? Finishing touches, somehow introducing designs, fixing bugs, etc. Due to the fact that we did not have access to the API EMP (developer registration takes about a week), we could not access our main treasure, so we had to do a tour version of the main functions, which, however, did not bother the jury .
So, the designer draws a presentation, which surprisingly turned out much better than the static images from the rest. We test the latest versions, of course, we find some errors exactly before the delivery, but miraculously correct them and send the presentation to the mail of the computer from which the launch will occur. We distribute phones to the jury, our wizard-designer goes to the front, gets some tart questions, makes the audience laugh. Well, everything is as planned. I was very disappointed that we were the only application (here we were de-anonymized), which did not offer any monetization, but simply put the idea “An application for Muscovites”. This did not cause any delight in the jury, but in general, it’s all the same, the main thing is that the users are happy.
Among the jury was one representative from SONY and ORACLE. Among the participants (there were 28 teams), about 40% were low-grade applications, since developed mainly alone or in a very small team. Someone went out, very shy, some freshmen from HSE, who three managed to make some kind of prototype, where the route on the map was laid with a straight line a la helicopter, someone made just disgusting applications that didn’t really know anything.
But I just paid a lot of attention to the Windows Phone developers and, due to a lot of excitement, was too critical. Another 40% were just good apps that deserve to compete for the title of the best, but on condition that the leaders make mistakes. Well, finally, 20% of really high-quality applications that are able to turn the usual services and bring something new (no, I don’t attribute our application to this share).
Result of the first round
Win application Citigram, which you can easily find in Google. Now I don’t want to express our general opinion about this application, since it will look like an attempt to omit the winner, but if in brief, the idea is, of course, excellent, but it disappointed the complete copy-paste of the code that the developers of Durov so zealously wrote.
We won a prize, a prize from ORACLE - two certificates for free completion of any courses, or something like that. There are four of us, and there are two certificates. I
I’m not particularly interested in this company, I don’t write for Android, but I don’t use Java, it didn’t make sense to me, besides, the certificate was aimed at graduates who all the guys from our team, except me, will soon become. 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 would distribute the certificate to everyone.
Gone or not?
To say that we were worried is to say nothing. These goosebumps, when they call the team and ask to go out, get a certificate, this feeling that everything, the final stretch, now everything depends on us ... There was no such thing. The presenter comes out and says that everyone goes to the second stage. Bravo! Simply put, you are told that all your attempts were in vain and we did not choose any of the best, so go all of you to work, maybe see you in two weeks. Well? In fact, everything, of course, was not so scary, but we generally had a damn about it, 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, I take off sleep and immediately on drops of motivation, I continue to refine the application, making it at least beautiful and convenient. Meanwhile, the application for a developer account has already been sent to the EMP.
But it is worth something to tell immediately. The fact is that any action that you want to perform with the EMP will require time to check. This is not some Vkontaktik where you need to register and just start using a convenient API with a sandbox, fu, so normal people do not.
Total:
4-5 days to send me a message that I have already sent a password for the account. As it turned out, once upon a time I did register there. Link to password recovery? What for. Where better to get the date of the message and look in your mail for a letter from them with a password. You think it was that simple, right? Logged in, registered, waited 5 days and started using the service? Well, no, it's not safe, because we have to 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! Now, only I will check how my personal account looks and the documentation there. Surely, our guys from the government have tried.
Wait a second. Sending a password in a GET request. Seriously? Imagine your face now. With such a face, we were almost all the time while we were browsing through the documentation. Okay, guys, we all understand, but we have to finish this application. All agreed and continued to work. I send the first request. In reply:
{"errorCode":403,"errorMessage":"Core::Authorization failed."} Just a second, what is this. Problem with authorization? Strange. It seems to do everything right. What do you say? Need to request access to specific APIs? Good, but I just tried to log in. What? For this, you also need to request access. Hm Well, where to click, but then I can not wait.
Well, if without this pun, then everything ended up in order to access the API, you need 3 days . But we are already experienced guys, so according to our formula, we need to take this number and add 2-3 days to it. So it was. And now attention.
Exactly at midnight on Sunday, all our requests to the API get permission. Well, I think the thought is clear.
Chaos
Here we understand that there is complete chaos. They write to us by mail, in a friendly way asking how we are doing (sending out to everyone) and asking to ask questions. We told them, asked to speed up the confirmation of the API (at this point, we have not received it yet). In response, they are silent. We write to those guys that came to us on the first day and listened to questions. They say that they can not affect the speed of verification. Well, yes, the program will not switch itself into the “Disable Test Simulation” mode. And also ask them to tell us the e-mail, from which they will download the application for Windows Phone, so that I can instantly put in the form of a BETA version, since the time is very short and we do not have time (the check takes about 5 working days). They say they will send e-mail soon. To speed up the process, I sent a personal message to one of the organizers, where I explained in detail the situation that, because of the time we spent sitting in one place and waiting until we were given access, I no longer have time to upload it to the Store. We urgently begin to look for a way out. One developer from the team remembers that all that is passed through their API is GET requests, gets a sniffer and sends us the keys ... Use someone else's tokens to take part in their own competition ... In my opinion, this is absurd.
Total
That organizer read the message that evening, but did not deign to reply to it until now. The guys with the e-mail correspondence did not send me an e-mail. All my strength on smarka. We were not given any test data for testing the API. We put out some Android version, but without a normal API (there were problems with the encoding, no other bugs, and many more) this is essentially a dummy application. Same for Windows Phone. Deadline was transferred times 2 or 3, I do not remember. Only recently we learned who won the hackathon. We have not been contacted about the certificates, although we sent a general letter several times.
Of course, there were a lot of good things, such as a great conference room with comfortable seating, a large blackboard, but all the good impressions were mostly from the atmosphere itself rather than from concrete actions. About the second stage of good, I can not say anything.
PS
I immediately want to apologize for the mistakes that there are so many (write about them in HP, 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. All happiness, participate in hakatonah.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/224743/
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