Hackaton_weekend | Fear and Loathing in Stavropol

We had two bags of food, 20 cores, 26 gigabytes of RAM, 2 boxes of redbulla and a whole sea of ​​colorful ideas and solutions ...

The WITME team is ready to report on the hackathon, which took place in the wonderful city of Stavropol!
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Participation has become for our team a kind of team building. We have already written about team building in one of our articles, you know from it - we have our own approach to such things. A two-day diet consisting of energy drinks and cold pizza is our way!

One fine cold March day, a message came from a member of our team to a general chat:

“I propose to discuss the option to go to the hakaton in Stavropol. It sounds crazy, but I'm sure it will be cool! ”

Yes, it sounded really insane. But the spirit of adventurism completely discouraged common sense and the decision about the trip was made that evening.

So, 1,400 km. the path with a respite in Rostov-on-Don is behind, we are at the site half an hour before the start of the registration of teams.

The most interesting! Announcement of the hackathon theme. Theme is an application-assistant for residents of the city, in the priority of Stavropol.

48 hours set aside for development, let's go. This is our stress test and we will pass it.

The first night was stormy. We are brainstorming, a bunch of ideas and suggestions. By 8 o'clock in the morning we began to understand that we need to have a good sleep, since by 9 we need to be in the NCFU, and there is no way to be late. Despite the closing eyes, the brain, which is already working at a maximum of one-third, we were able to form a list of ideas that were more or less worthy and doable in the time remaining.

It includes:
- an application for tourists, which would allow walking around the city in any direction and receive notifications when approaching interesting places.
- Interactive "hot potatoes" using the phone, players can pass on the baton in any direction they like, taking into account the direction of the swing of the phone.
- free the lane - a social service notifying drivers of the need to free the lane for special vehicles (emergency and fire brigades)
- application to help your neighbor. Allows you to leave a request for the necessary assistance, visible on the map for all users of the service.

After a long debate, we finally decided. We chose the service "Suddenly" (that was how it was decided to call it) a service to help our neighbor.

1) The task was doable for the remaining time, but there was not much left of it.
2) An application that would have a more significant role in people's lives is difficult to come up with (if you do not take into account already existing services).
3) It was this idea that allowed us to stop arguing. She was so pleased with the team that, it seems, the thought of this application came to everyone at the same time.

By the middle of the second day we were inspired by the idea of ​​work. All application screens were drawn and approved.

Further, the story is on behalf of the iOS developer.

The guys and I discussed the idea, we came to the final concept, I began to file a prototype. Knowing that we had as much as 30 hours left, I quietly began to prepare everything I needed. The team we had was solid, I knew exactly what would be needed for work.
While startkran sawed the API, I wrote down the framework frameworks and prepared a class for requests (I didn’t even use my own skills, so honestly we decided to go to the hackathon, well, or I didn’t have them, because I conduct my main projects on Objective C, and then I decided to show off and write on Swift. ) Then I started shaking the designer on the screen, to which he, a creative person, sent me to code further, they say, do not bother me, I see it.
I continued to prepare the soil. Since, I repeat, we have already worked together, I had a ready-made scheme for working out "non-existent" requests / responses. In real life, I had already written a library for debugging such queries, but here is a hackathon, and also Swift. So I played enough with Alamofire, then I got a lot of impressions from screwing the library for caching images, I realized that the hackathon has its own coding rules, and most importantly I realized that I don’t need to use a language in which I didn’t step on the rake (or those that are needed to solve a particular problem). But there was nowhere to go, as time went on, but we didn’t have a working application.
In the middle of the night, I received the API, the screens from the designer, and the heartbreaking presentation of our PR person. "Cool!" I thought, and proceeded to implement all this goodness. Then I watched as my "fighters" surrendered in the fight against sleep. The first PR fell in unequal battle, he fell asleep in the position of the embryo on the top shelf and mumbled something absurd. Then the designator - he gave up in the process of drawing the layout, and in the morning he retired to the kingdom of Morpheus and PHP's sitting in a chair. I continued to knock on the keyboard and in passing swore at Swift.
Dawn. I finished doing the basic functionality. Now our application could almost everything that we have outlined. The result corresponded to the design of the layout, in any case, it seemed to me. Sleep - 30 minutes and running on the final day of the hackathon. For the last 5 hours, it was necessary to fasten a couple of features, make a normal UI, work out the scripts, test it (yes it was a hackathon and yes, we wanted to test it).
As a result, we had an application in which it was implemented:
- demonstration of the map with pins and “calls for help”
- placing on the map the user's pins with a "cry for help"
- the ability to respond to the "cry for help"
- an opportunity to note that the problem has been solved and help is not needed, then a push is sent to everyone who responded
- the ability to fill out your profile (avatar, links, phone number)
- the ability to contact the link or the phone number with the author of "cry for help" and vice versa, with the responded user
- construction of the route to the "victim"

Here is the interface:

The result we were satisfied, the application looked pretty succinctly, without garbage. The main thing is that it is from scratch, even without a ready-made idea and groundwork, turned into a kind of production in 48 hours, albeit in such a small arena as a hackathon.

I return the virtual microphone to the author of the article.

We, brutally tired, full of pride, waited our turn. Minutes turned into hours, the performance of each team seemed to last forever. Suddenly…

Hosting ordered to live long, everything fell. All 48 hours of work swept before our eyes. Everybody had a cold sweat. Hateful minutes turned into seconds and flew past. In my head, only one thing - everything, the final. Thoughts of a long and painful journey home did not leave us. Imagine going 1400 km. silently?

I would like to note the loyalty of the jury, thanks to which we were able to postpone the performance for troubleshooting. However, the server did not rise, we broke off all those. Support, already damned, well-known free hosting.

The support was silent, but after a minute, when there were only a couple of nerve cells at all, everything worked again as if nothing had happened. We exhaled, the minutes returned to their time format again. Someone even found the strength to joke: “Now we need to have time to show it, before everything collapses again!”

We made! They told about how well, finally, start helping each other. How useful can be "Suddenly", answered a lot of questions of the jury and other participants. We were even lucky enough to talk about our main project WITHME . And we gave an interview to the local TV channel!

Then followed the agonizing wait for the results of the voting.

Moment of truth! We were awarded prizes in two categories:

- 2nd place in the overall standings
- Prize for the best male role
- Prize for the most technologically advanced project from Infocom-S



Damn hackathon, after it delivers you so that you look like a drunkard from the old Irish short story: the complete loss of motor-supporting skills, hallucinations and loss of balance, the language goes numb, the strikers begin, the spine refuses ...

PS Do not trust any well-known free hosting =)
PPS Participate in hackathons - this is a great opportunity to see your home country and hone your skills.