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Was geht ab? - DataArt at THack Berlin 2016


Author: Andrey Belyaev


“Was gent ab?” - a letter with such a headline fell on the DataArt travel-practice mailing list on January 18. This year in Berlin, the leading portal tnooz.com again collected hackathon, and we again decided to go. There were two reasons:
  1. An interesting experience. I wanted to see what other ideas came to mind to colleagues from other companies.
  2. March 9th began the 50th - anniversary - ITB exhibition in the same Berlin and our participation or, all the more (well, all of a sudden!) Victory, could bring good dividends when talking to future customers.

Last year, the DataArt team participated for the first time and quite unexpectedly won the first prize tnooz for large teams. This time, we already had some idea of ​​what awaits us. On the technical side, they were ready for 150%: two developers who participated in the hackathon in 2015, Dima and Yaroslav, were ready to go again. Denis Tsyplakov, who organized the entire trip last time, was replaced by me. There was only one problem: there was no ideological mastermind. All the generators of ideas, including Roman Peskin, were fully occupied with current affairs and could not be in Berlin in March. In addition, they limited themselves to general phrases about the hackathon topic:
It was the time of the hackathon.

You don’t have sponsors to understand which APIs you can use, or a list of “challenges” - the tasks that the project should solve. T. h. With the ideas of the project was also quite sad. They organized several brainstorming sessions, but by the end of February there were not so many working ideas:
  1. Assistant business traveler. A large map with notes about those who are on a business trip and assistance in difficult situations through a companion mobile application.
  2. Trello-like-applications for the help of a company of friends who want to go somewhere.

Help came from no waiting. The head of the travel-practice, Greg Abbott, with whom we shared our pain, recommended us as a generator of ideas and inspirer of the team of Bob Rogers, who:
  1. Had a very solid experience in the travel-industry.
  2. He lived (and lives) in Berlin.

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In one of the last brainstorming sessions, Bob threw the following idea: to make an assistant application for those traveling on a journey that just before the trip in the background downloads all sorts of utilities to the smartphone: location map, information about transport, local interesting events (concerts, etc. .).
This idea and decided to take in as a worker. Until more information was received from tnooz, it was decided not to lead any development. As last year’s practice showed, in 24 hours you can manage to make a working prototype and even win with it.
March 1 received a letter from the organizers. The hackathon's sponsors were:
  1. HomeAway - provided their API for finding housing.
  2. SkyScanner - API to search for air tickets.
  3. Xapix.io is an API proxy that allows you to build many other APIs and publish them through a single interface.

After that, it became clear that our application “offline companion” would not have many chances to win, because of the two API sponsors, we could only pull HomeAway with a stretch. On March 2, everybody outplayed again; they took Trello-like assistant for travel planning as a working idea. The mood was not to say to be enthusiastic. The general idea was: “probably, they won’t give us a second time in a row. But we will still burn. "
On March 3, we arrived in Berlin and moved to the betahaus for a dating evening, which was arranged by the editor-in-chief of tnooz Gene Quinn for those who came to THack and did not find a team. There you could find the missing designer, mastermind, coder, and just talk. Our team was ready: Bob, Dima, Yaroslav and I, that is, for us it was just a meeting place with Bob. Well, I also wanted to see other participants. The evening was attended by Paige Brown, HomeAway marketing director, and HomeAway API developer Cade Parker, who told us that this would be a serious test for his brainchild, who was a week old in production. In addition to Paige and Cade, at the evening there were guys from xapix who told everyone about their product and how to prepare it correctly.
Half an hour after the start, Bob approached us, and we went away to make plans for Zur kleinen Markthalle. There, after Bob's sentimental story about his travel experience during his time at Nokia, with the help of brains, pens, napkins, beer and chicken halves, an application concept was born that was supposed to make life easier for travelers and travel managers with the following things:
  1. A bot that, based on an invitation from the Google Calendar, which contains the travel destination, the start date of the trip and the end date, would select flights for all participants.
  2. In addition to flights, the bot also had to be able to offer accommodation not far from the place where the person was traveling. Housing was chosen one for all participants.
  3. Web interface for travel, in which he could choose a flight and vote for the place of residence.
  4. A web interface for a travel manager where you can buy tickets for selected flights and book a lodging that has gained more votes.
  5. Mobile application for travel, which would store information about dates of travel, flight, hotel and other things.

Everyone liked the idea, and we went to the hotel to sleep off before a sleepless weekend. It should be noted that the applications for the application, the account on GitHub and the server in AWS were ready.
Saturday began with a breakfast in the betahaus, the opening words of Gene and Paige, nominations and prizes were announced. After all went to the rooms and began to develop. We had the following technology stack:

Xapix decided not to use it, because Dima had a very good experience with all sorts of Travel APIs directly, so we didn’t want to add another layer of abstraction to the application, which did not depend on us. Although we must pay tribute to Oliver from Xapix - he tried very hard to ensure that his product delivered as little trouble as possible to the participants: he organized a master class and wrote a small textbook .
As a Java developer, I was entrusted to write code that does not require deep knowledge of .NET frameworks: pick up mail from gmail, parse the invitation, etc. The only thing I missed when working was the absence of the usual hot keys in Visual Studio. Especially liked the design type:



Dima glued everything together, and Yaroslav sawed an iOS application. Bob helped us debug the process of how things should work, gave advice on organizing the UI, and wrote the script demo. In the process, it turned out that we have a little time, and we screwed a small simple piece of functionality to the mobile application, which showed the user all sorts of interesting events that took place near his hotel, so that after a working day the detached people would not be bored (see the before hakaton).
At about 11 o'clock we went to the hotel, where we continued to polish what happened during the day of work.
It is Sunday, March 6th. In the morning, quickly (it was necessary to be in time before 12 noon) they screwed up a push notification to the mobile application, drove the demo several times while rehearsing Bob's speech at the same time. It was necessary to meet in 5 minutes, it was one of the conditions of the competition. At the rehearsal, it was 4:40, this time they decided to finish rehearsing, they took a video from the screen of Yaroslav's iPhone in case something suddenly goes wrong with the mobile application, and went for lunch. During lunch, Dima skillfully discussed with Cade Parker the advantages of SkyScanner's API organization over HomeAway, while the rest of the team talked with rivals.
We were lucky to draw lots, we had to play the eighth of 15 teams. In the nomination "Large teams" there were 13 contestants, including the chance to take 1st place was, but not very high. And again: “For the second year in a row? Not-uh, definitely not winning. "
So the hour of judgment has arrived. Presented by the jury:

The teams came out in turn and presented their prototypes. There were all sorts of interesting things:
  1. Use Alexa voice assistant to search for interesting events and plan trips to these events.
  2. A team with a funny name WhoDatGirl presented a bot for Telegram, which can tell what interesting things are happening in the world and help to find tickets for this event given the limited budget.
  3. Halfway is an application that allowed a pair of lovers living in different cities to meet somewhere in the third city. And the trip was planned so that they could spend together the maximum amount of time.
  4. TripNaut - mobile quest game to explore the place of stay. Awesome design. The team managed to buy identical T-shirts in 24 hours and draw a logo on them.



Our performance was almost no problem, Bob lit on the stage, the iPhone in Yaroslav’s hands cheered cheerfully when I received push notifications in front of the jury, I helped Bob by illustrating his speech by switching slides in the presentation and adding chaos by not could find alt-tab on his macbook to switch from presentation to browser and back. But the chain “calendar - mail - flight choice - housing choice - confirmation - look, everything on my smartphone” worked without a hitch, without a hitch, which we were very pleased about.
After the performance of all the teams, the judges retired to the meeting, and the organizers brought the beer - the time flew by unnoticed and fun. Upon the return of the jury, the materialization of the spirits and the distribution of elephants began.
The first sponsors were HomeAway. The honorable mention was given to the guys from HalfWay and WhoDatGirl. Second place - the guys who developed the application for Alexa. And the first place is DataArt! Joy knew no bounds. At least something yes won.
Then came the turn of the jury to announce the winners. In the category of small teams, developers won a product whose product, based on a playlist from Spotify, offered trips to concerts of their favorite groups.
In the category of large teams, second place is WhoDatGirl. And the first is DataArt. "Well, you know yourself!" - we all thought. Bob thought the same, but in English. It turns out that if there is a good idea and desire, you can win two times in a row. After the ceremony, Gene approached us and said that the next hackathon would be better for us to come as sponsors and organize a master class for those who want to develop applications for the travel industry. It was two days before ITB.
The list of heroes:

Name
Role
Tech stack
Bob rogs
Invited star and inspirer
Brain, Keynote, PowerPoint
Dmitry Vyrostkov
Architect, web app developer
.NET, JavaScript
Yaroslav Vorontsov
iOS Developer
Objective c
Belyaev Andrey
Back-end developer and idea collector
.NET


A shorter story can be read on tnooz .

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/392163/

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