KinOverflow: Hack Week Project in Tel Aviv

A while ago we shared all of the awesome projects we hacked and developed during our annual Hack week in Tel Aviv.

In that hack-week I joined my colleague Yossi Rizgan, an active contributor to stackoverflow (for android), in his idea to build a demo app that demonstrates how real monetary value could be given to users contributing to stackoverflow using KIN.

We brainstormed together how KIN could be used within stackoverflow and we had plenty of ideas! Since this was a 3 day hackathon, we narrowed them to the simplest feature that would be good enough for a demo and easy enough to complete during the limited time. The KinOverflow demo that we came up with gives contributors an initial award in KIN and then lets them use some of that KIN to tip other contributors for adding useful questions and/or providing good answers.

We developed KinOverflow as an android app that has a similar look and feel to the real stackoverflow app. The app uses our open source android KIN sdk in order to create a KIN wallet and make KIN payments. It also uses the stackexchange api to pull real stackoverflow questions and answers! The code is open source and you can find it here.

Ideally, we would base the amount of the initial award on existing badges and reputation that the contributors have. But for the demo, it was simpler to start by giving out the same amount. Side note, we used our testnet fountain service for that and the service always gives 10,000 of ‘test’ kin to testnet public addresses. Another idea that we had and did not implement in the demo, was to continue to award users at later stages as they reached certain levels of reputation and/or badges. We also thought that it would be nice to be able to raise a bounty for a question in KIN. In addition to this, we also thought of scenarios where contributors could be selected to answer a specific question and could be offered KIN in private for taking the time to look at this specific question.

I had a lot of fun working with Yossi Rizgan on this project. For me, it was also a great learning experience as it was my first trial at coding in kotlin. We made a funny video to demonstrate our app. I sincerely hope that CommonsWare and Jon Skeet won’t mind us sort of impersonating them in this demo video — Please note that they had nothing to do with this demo and that the questions & answers that we demonstrate were picked randomly and are NOT questions/answers that they actually posted.

Hope you enjoy watching the video!