Coding Night #5

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BlaBlaCar

5 min readSep 6, 2018

End of May, BlaBlaCar hosted its 5th internal coding event: 24 hours of non-stop coding/designing, whatever the project, whatever the technology from Thursday 2pm to Friday 2pm. Goals: Bring innovation, stimulate creativity & spend time together. See our medium article about the previous edition here.

3 new things this year

1. New joiners in da game!

This year we’ve welcomed the creative people of marketing & design teams. They have worked on non-tech-mandatory projects (e.g. a loyalty program based only on CRM messages). We wanted to make dreams come true for everyone!

We’ve also welcomed 6 students from School 42 to code with us. We wanted to give them the opportunity to learn from our engineers.

2. All-night-long 🎶 achievement system

In 2018, we decided to have no more t-shirt that most of us wore once and then use as pyjamas. Instead we’ve introduced an all-night-long achievement system… Stickers that you collect every 3 hours.

3. A “do-good” project for an organization

The Red Cross from Paris 1st & 2nd districts joined the Coding Night. A team of 5 engineers worked on an alerting system to help them to improve their organization during majors attacks.

Team working on the project including Red Cross Volunteers

Burger Quiz theme

For every edition we try to have a funny theme & this time we took it to the next level. This new edition was about Burgers: food, prizes, stickers and games (Do you know how many burger you can eat in 10 minutes?)…

Why? And why not?! Maybe just because we ❤ burgers.

6 prizes to win

We’ve created 6 prizes (including a special one) based on our Principles & Burger theme. (Learn more about our principles here)

Fat & Serious: “Fun & Serious” × Fat → Most useful project
Big Dream: “Dream Decide Deliver” × Big Mac → Most wow project
Fail-o-Fish: “Fail Learn Succeed” × Filet o Fish → Most WTF or fun project
Be Meat. Go Far: “Be Lean, Go Far” × Meat → Most “Ready to use” project
Be the king: “Be the Member” × Burger king → Most voted project in total
Shake more: “Share more, Learn More” × Shake Shack → Special Jury prize

1 night, 50 talents, 12 projects

Meet with Beacon: build an application to automatically confirm when a passenger had met his driver, thanks to little Beacon devices.
Lazy: a command line tool to manage websites and their certificates configuration automatically.
Throttlesharing: an online (quite massive) race where you have to tap (gently…) your phone screen to speed up your car and win!
BlaBlaXtension: a chrome extension working with Google Maps to let you publish a BlaBlaCar ride very easily when you are looking for a route, or see search results when you are looking for a means of transportation between 2 cities.
BlaBlaCar.io: build a career site to gather all our tech content (Social medias, open positions, videos os BlaBlaCar Speakers on stage…)
Trip details meeting point sourcing: a smart tool to detect and extract Meeting Point information (written by our members) from trip detail pages.
Realtime fraud detection: a tool to detect abnormal behaviors on our platform.
The Red Alert: build an alerting tool to help the Red Cross contact volunteers and check their availability during major events.
BlaBlaClub: create a loyalty program to congrat & reward the top carpoolers.
Top Body Challenge: an app that provide physical exercises on a regular basis (using “gorgeous” models from the BlaBlaCar crew to show how to…)
Beer Myself: a Slack application to handle the attendees to our “Pot Tech” (afterwork every Thursday evening) to get a free drink!
Emoji Master: it’s a game on Slack based on “Reactjis” (Emojis used to react to a message). It will determine who is the Emoji Master that was the first one to react on a message with the most used reacji!
Toll!: a google map integration able to compute the toll price for motorways.