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

It all started last summer, when my companion and I were a little sad, and we decided that we would take part in entertaining and developing competitions with programming elements, or hackathones, as the damned bourgeois called them. Without hesitation, we stopped our eyes on the Valley of Silicon, since there are many events of a similar subject and there is a high chance of finding interesting ones for 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 have 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, northern California, and his friend is in the equally glorious city of Nizhny Novgorod, from where the author himself comes from. Your humble servant beat the thresholds of the places of events personally, and the 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 not a 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, to find an original and interesting idea, and its partial or complete implementation in a short period of time without any preliminary preparation.

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Food hunters

First of all, we ran into a rather apothetical event, namely, the hackathon, organized by the Product Hunt (PH) team. I believe that many people know what this site is and how extensive and popular is its community. 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, quite frankly, quite successfully. They chose a theme that was convenient for themselves, namely, they suggested that developers should dream up using the API of their site, and just program it to a free topic.



The venue of the event was arranged at the headquarters of the father-grandparent Dropbox and Airbnb Y Combinator, which only added to the hype. On top of that, the prizes were a “dream package” for any start-up, namely, organizing a meeting with the leading investment funds of the valley, interviews and free co-working hours at Y Combinator. I’ll clarify that the very fact that you are on the Y Combinator start-up list practically provides you with a guarantee of excellent investment rounds, provided that you don’t leave on the back of the fact of joining it.







After some thought, we came to the conclusion that the most obvious and most probable projects lie in the statistical planes of posts, the definition of the king of the hill for some pseudometrics, and other scribes. I didn’t think anything sensible until I climbed into the drawer of my desk and didn’t see Google’s long-forgotten glasses under a layer of dust. The toad inside me revived and offered me to breathe a little bit of sense into the very same $ 1,500 dollars (a lot of rubles) I spent secretly from my wife. This is how the idea of ​​the Google Glass web client service for the Product Hunt site appeared. You will say that this is not original and not at all interesting, and I will agree, but then we believed that it would be useful for the community (thus 3 people who use glasses) and bring some clarity to the PH logo (I’m talking about a cat with glasses ). I then ran all evening there and exclaimed “Now it makes sense! Make sense! ”







Having drilled the conditional 48 hours and didn’t really sleep, I waited for my turn and presented (otpichit) the project , proudly demonstrating PH to its founders. They smiled pleasantly, nodded slightly and told me to write them a letter about access to the record in their database (for implementing the voting functionality; access was not given due to unavailability) and went to listen to the remaining projects and make a fateful decision. As a result, we are in the top 20 list of 300 projects submitted worldwide, which, in general, was not bad for the first time. And the first on the village was the project of one enthusiast, who came at the end of the first day with his monitor with his armpit, like 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 make 90% of the project before the hackathon). The remaining projects seemed to us rather weak, however, it is all in taste and color.



After standing a bit and chatting with just anyone, I exchanged a few phrases with PH founder Rayn, saying that they were cool, and received an answer that I, “probably”, was also cool. On these wings, I took a couple of big 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 was proud to be Tim Cook, but he was not surprised by anyone. A little earlier, he announced a miracle of expensive watches 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 advertise and cut down a little Franklin on this and organized the World's First Hackathon for Apple Watch . And we successfully swallowed this bait.



It was obvious that the clock, by itself, is not suitable for much and is best adapted to display notifications and real-time data. And where to get the data? That's right, now anywhere. The Internet just breaks away from data sources, but I went straight to DataSF.org to figure out which data on the city of San Francisco is available, in what form, and whether they are of interest to the owner of the watch. The data on the police reports, which contained information on crimes with details on the type of crime and its geographic coordinates within the city, seemed most interesting to us.



Thus, an idea was born about an application that displays a certain level of criminogenic situation in the current location of the user. The city was divided into districts, we found data on the population in each of the districts and determined the simplest criminality metric as the ratio of the number of crimes to the population of the district with the ability to filter by types of crimes. That is, if you are suddenly afraid of leaving your car in the current area, you can always check the level of criminality by filtering only crimes such as opening, robbery and car theft. Very convenient, both for law-abiding owners of watches, and for criminals. In short, the situation of Win - Win.



One of the most important conditions is to make everything beautiful. Therefore, I threw a few sketches and sent them to my 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 bit exciting, and “it's your time, Valera”.







Further, having pretty much suffered from the debugging 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, which counted the criminality metrics according to filters and geo points and passed out the REST API. It was implemented a simple application on the iPhone, which communicated with our service, then with the clock, and also allows you to set up filtering by crime. Glance was spinning on the clock, showing all the beauty of the animation and the application showing the table type - 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, but animation in the simulator.



Then it's time to pitch for each project . I quite cheerfully otbrabanil and in the end the judges gave us the victory in the category of "innovation". The judges liked the fact that we used “boring” government data and wrapped them in a real life case.







Pleased with myself, I listened to 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 promised Apple Store cards (and I even planned to press 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 selected to the first place.

Coding in the clouds

The time has come for a global hacking from Koding . The startup provides something like a virtual machine with support for the editor and terminal right in the browser. To declare themselves to the whole world and attract more users, the guys staged a global hackathon with excellent prizes and sponsors. And here we are. Besides us, 2000 teams from all over the world looked at the light. Russians were also represented there.



Armed with the theme of the problems of peace and visualization, we began to think and scour in search of suitable data. We found nothing better than structuring than information about cataclysms (natural and diseases) in the world, so we decided to beautifully visualize the whole thing using the Web GL stack. As soon as possible, shortly before that, I came across chrome experiments and this one is a nice ball . We got this:







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







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



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



First, the results were promised four days later, that is, on Thursday, then they were transferred to Monday, and yesterday they were finally (?) Moved forward four days ahead. At the same time, they organized a public vote , which, firstly, requires Facebook accounts for voters and, secondly, is clearly not conducive to the spread of justice throughout the world.



Finally, we come to the point for which I wrote all this and tried so hard! I am against cheating not in my favor, and I urge you, habrovchane, to leave your mark on this intergalactic hakatone. View the full list of projects and rate them fairly. 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 them with habraeffekt!



Voting ended and we went to the final round! We express our gratitude to all not indifferent!



Thank you for your attention and hello to all of sunny California!