Being Adventurous at the Amazon Hackathon

Last Friday saw the first Amazon UK Hackthon take place in Glasgow University. With a top prize of $1000 of AWS credit on offer over 50 of Glasgows most talented CS students were in attendance.

I formed a team with two very talented University of Strathclyde Computer Science students, Daniel Reilly from first year and Chris Sloey from fourth year. Our idea was to create a shopping list for your travels. You input your destination and when you’re going and we return a list of things you’re going to need, so say your heading to Glasgow in July we’ll let you know you’re going to need an umbrella.

The team had a stack of knowledge and experience in Java, PHP, Ruby, Javascript with a touch of Objective-C. However we figured we were there to learn so we may as well be adventurous and try something new so we decided to build our hack with a language we had never used before so we went with Python. We set out to develop an API and from there we would build a mobile app and with time permitting a web front end.

With such an adventurous target we set out working the lean way – fail fast! We initially intended on using the go-to Python framework Django however we ran into a few problems and found the learning curve a tad too steep and with time against us we had a pivot and used the microframework Flask. We powered on made great progress and were ready to deploy, all attendees were given $50 AWS credit which would allow us to use EC2 but as feature packed as EC2 is we found it too time consuming getting set up and since we were using a git repository anyway we went with Heroku for hosting. Then we moved onto the front end, again the easy route was to do a web app but we wanted a bit of a challenge and decided to develop a mobile app, the outcome was Travel Bit for iOS.

the bits and bobs you’ll need on your travels

After a night of lean working we pitched to a panel of ‘Amazonians’ along with the other teams. Hacks that caught my eye include an awesome implementation of voice control for the Amazon store via the browser by Mark Provan (and his team the Bogus Gasmen) and winner of the People’s Choice Award a crowd sourced tool for decision making by Giraffa Cakes. Whilst we didn’t win me and the guys are well chuffed with how we worked as a team and what we achieved. We hope to work on Travel Bit a bit more and hopefully launch it in the coming weeks.

Big thank you to Glasgow University for hosting and to the Edinburgh Amazon Development Centre for putting it on, hopefully see a lot more Amazon Hackathons across Scotland in the future.

*If you missed out on the Amazon Hackathon remember Startup Weekend Glasgow is coming up on May 25th-27th with £30 early bird tickets now available.