"EverNoble" wins That Conference 2012's Hackathon for "Best Use of Azure"!
Aug 15, 2012 · CommentsI am currently at “That Conference”, a brand new 3 day software development conference located in the Wisconsin Dells. Last night, I participated in a 4 hour hackathon - my first ever! Categories included “Best Use of Twilio”, “Best Use of Windows Azure”, and “Best Summer Camp theme”. My app won first place for “Best use of Windows Azure”!
It’s easy to forget things if you don’t write them down, so I use Evernote for organizing my thoughts, daily todo’s and projects. What if you have a thought/idea/note that you want to remember, but for some reason WIFI is not available? What if you don’t have a smart phone? My app allows you to send a text message to a special number, which then creates a new note in Evernote with the text message body.
Notable Details:
- Built on multiple services: a Windows Azure-hosted ASP.NET MVC3 web application, Twilio (for text message/SMS capabilities), and the Evernote Web API (to create a new Evernote note)
- 4 hour sprint (7pm to 11pm, but judging/presentations took us to 12:30am!)
- Famous (in tech) Microsoft community manager Scott Hanselman as a Guest Judge
- Prize: free beer tickets for Happy Hour (ha!) and a Sphero device
Technical Implementation:
I set up a free phone number through Twilio that when texted, sent the SMS details to an Azure-hosted MVC web application via a POST request. The Azure app then creates a new Evernote note with the text message body.
What went wrong:
- Using TFS for source control: I worked with another developer on the app, so since we needed to be able share/contribute code, I figured TFS would work well. We used tfspreview.com to create a TFS account; unfortunately we lost at least 45 mins to trying to configure it. TFS wouldn’t accept my email address and I had to install a patch in order to fix a Visual Studio bug.
- Presentation nervousness: While I do admit that I’m still a rather weak speaker, I wasn’t nervous initially since only a small group of devs showed up to the event. However, once I noticed that Scott Hanselman was a judge, I did clam up a bit. I’m a big fan and follow all of his work, so to have him appear as a judge was a bit unreal.
- Conference center Internet Wifi: While I am able to say that Wifi at That Conference was better than most, I lost my connection multiple times. I was trying to build an app where 90% of the parts relied on having a constant access to the web, so this hurt productivity.
What went right:
- Project Scope: 4 hours is a very small amount of time to build anything useful, so I knew that I needed something basic yet interesting. I did some light preliminary research on the target platforms - luckily Twilio and Azure were very easy to set up - the real work was putting all the pieces together.
- Project Idea: The judges noted that my app was quite useful and really liked the overall concept, proving that it really is a good idea to generate ideas ahead of time (I had about 5). We successfully defended any critical questions raised and had good ideas for “v2”. Additionally, we were complemented on our use of source control.
- Platform Technologies: The platforms that we were designated to use were easy to set up and comprehend, which was especially great due to the very tight time frame. Windows Azure provided an easy-to-use cloud hosting solution; I could definitely see myself using it for future website projects. Twilio’s setup was the most impressive - obtain a phone number, give it the URL of the application to post data to and voila! No code to write. Lastly, Evernote provided a C# library with samples for connecting to their API; using the library saved a lot of time.
Summary
This was my first time participating in a hackathon. I certainly didn’t expect to win one of the prizes! Coming prepared with a variety of ideas and a competitive attitude are a must. It was a fantastic challenge that I hope to do again soon.