Wo! This year’s September has been crazy! I think I have never ever done so many stuff in a month before: travelled to Paris with Malin, participated in my first hackaton, travelled to Poland as part of my job at Medius (the Kraków office is freaking awesome btw), rid horses, ran races… uff XD

East Sweden Hack

As I said above, this month I had the opportunity to participate in my first hackathon and I must say that it completely blew my expectations out of the water by being unbelievably awesome :). The venue, the food, the organizers who did an outstanding job, coaches, my teammate, the other teams, everything and everyone was great. If you ever get the chance to join one of these events, don’t hesitate; you are going to have a blast. If you are going to remember something after reading this blog post, let it be just that :).

As you may know, hackathons usually have a topic, which oftentimes is related to using some API or technology provided by the sponsors of the event. In this case, the city of Linköping, the county of Östergötland and diverse state related entities provided a series of open data APIs to help us improve, in some way, the lives of the inhabitants or the occassional visitors of this area of Sweden. So, with that premise in mind, and the limitations imposed by the perhaps a little bit uninteresting APIs we decided to build a local recommendation engine, which we called Inspirr.

So, following our own personal agenda, which was to geek out and tinker with new technologies, we went and built Inspirr with the MEAN stack (as in MongoExpressAngularNode) or to be more accurate the -EAN stack, since we did never get the chance to setup a DB xD. Below is the result for you to see and try:

The hack in itself was a blast, we performed the kind of development that I love (or almost, we did abandon TDD quite fast due to our limitations in this completely new stack and the time constraints XD), being laser focused on our MVP, growing the application as if it was a living entity, iterating fast, deploying to production (heroku) every hour…

Here is our final pitch. Beware of my dreadful Swedish xD.

As I was cycling home, I couldn’t help but to think that I had taken part in something special. ^_^

It’s looking like October will be a much calmer month and one ideal for programming! :) I am looking forward to start working on a new side project. I’ll keep you updated. Good night!