Sleepless weekend @ Rush Hour Mobility hackathon
Just imagine that you live in a big city and spend 1–2 hours commuting to work every day. Actually, you are in the overcrowded train right now, sweating along with other “happy” workers. Your train stops on the next station and all passengers “sont invités à descendre”.
You are taking the bus, but it’s also stuck in the traffic jam a few kilometers away from the office. So you finally decide just go on foot and arrive at work when your colleagues are leaving for lunch. Well, if you live in Paris you don’t need to imagine anything — fighting transport is part of your routine.
I've spent last weekend at the office of Renault Digital playing with a modeling environment called MEAOO, which allows to simulate a city with different transport systems and conditions, trigger exceptional events and then test different ideas of algorithms and applications intended to help users get out of troubles and complete their missions.
Let's do a hack
All developers know that giving access to their products is the most frightening part of work and you need a lot of courage to invite other people to test what’s you’ve done. But this is exactly what Renault Digital has done by organizing the hackathon with the help of BeMyApp.
Participants needed to develop innovative solutions, which use MEAOO API, to help the secret agent complete his mission (visit some predefined points). This technical component made the hackathon special because teams really needed to implement working applications. Not just pitch ideas 😉
There were 10 teams with more than 50 participants in total, competing for 3 cash prizes: 5000€, 3000€ and 2000€ for 1st, 2nd and 3rd places accordingly. We had 36 hours to develop solutions and then 6 minutes for demo, 3 minutes for pitch and 2 minutes for Q&A session.
Gathering a team
To participate in the hackathon you need a team. I didn’t have one, so needed to recruit people at the opening event on Friday night. It means I should talk with people, in French. My skills in both are far lower than I would like them to be, but each time it’s getting better and better 😉
After many awkward moments, I've succeeded to find 4 potential teammates, which I liked and was ready to work with. Later we've got another 3 people due "consolidation of teams" event 😁
Getting off the ground
On Friday we had only the opening event, while real hackathon location was in another place and another time. This is very smart approach, so participants can sleep well before starting projects.
Next morning, starting from the "petit-dejèuner" we had a tough schedule. In just 36 hours we needed to self-organize, think of innovative idea, succeed to implement it along with working solution for MEAOO API and last, but not the list, don't fall asleep while working 😴
Honestly speaking I liked the possibility to play with MEAOO City so much, that forgot about idea, pitch and other no-coding stuff 30 minutes after start and got back to reality only 2 hours before final demo.
All the documentation to MEAOO API is published on GitHub in open access here, so you can check it by yourselves (even though you don't have credentials to access API). I would love to have such a document for all APIs I use at my job @ 360Learning (😉, backend devs).
MQTT protocol is used for real-time update / publish messaging between platform and client applications, while some initial data can be extracted through usual REST API. I’ve never used MQTT before, but, thankfully, one of my teammates had and he nailed it in just 2–3 hours.
Navigating the big city
Initially our team wanted to develop a middle-man server application, which would calculate best options for the route and mobile application would just show them to user and handle interactions.
But 36 hours could be too short for such a solution, so we've started implementing navigation logic on the client side. It wasn't easy, but much more interesting than just integrating ready-to-use APIs.
Basically we had all the data needed, but it was shared between many MQTT and REST endpoints, so it took considerable time to put that all together and develop logic on top of it. Source code of application can be found on GitHub.
Flow begins when the user receives his mission — set of coordinates, which he needs to visit. Then on each target coordinate and exceptional event, we give him a few options to choose from on how to continue his mission.
On top of that user can always stop and choose another type of transport / coordinate. To improve UX we introduced a real-time map where user can see his position in the city, position of taxi and exceptional events.
Final demo
At the final demo we had an unknown mission, which was the same for all participants — it's the fairest demo ever, because all could see how agent is moving on the huge city replica (22 x 6 meters) created right in the hall.
The most challenging part for our team was to connect to Wi-Fi and then close all the windows on my desktop to make our demo looking decently. We've finished the mission successfully and in the record time.
Even though our demo and pitch wasn't that good, we've got the 3rd place thanks to our mobile application. Finally, there was a hackathon where developers are truly appreciated 😂
Conclusions
There is no point in going to hackathons to win prizes / money or to make living from it, even though BeMyApp events always have amazing food and drinks, so you can save a lot of money on that 😂
Hackathons are about connecting people with different backgrounds, having fun and challenging your own and world's limits. I feel a big respect for companies who are brave enough to host such events.
Few points, which I wanted to emphasize about this hackathon:
- modern and beautiful location of Renault Digital
- extremely high technical level of mentors
- eco-friendliness of event and location: no stickers, flyers, badges, plastic and other garbage, which we see on so many hackathons
- huge investment of time and efforts in developing MEAOO platform
- flawless organization on the part of BeMyApp France
Thanks once more to my team, all mentors and organizers for making my weekend that interesting (and sleepless) 🙏
