After finding out that the Devstack server we created during the walkthrough is not suitable for hosting web applications, I created a "plain" Rackspace server, installed Apache on it, and we proceeded to create a barebones web application. One of my goals was to get a clear idea how much progress a group of people could make on an application in a hackathon. The answer is, since we only got started after lunch (the first half of the day was taken up by the Devstack tutorial), and had until 4 pm to go: not much. But we got a little done.
Dana Bauer, Developer and Community Advocate at Rackspace, one of the organizers of the hackathon. She and another Rackspace employee helped us greatly with the registration glitches. At the end she encouraged people to give demos, or, lacking a demo, to stand up and speak about what they did, accomplished, or learned during the hackathon. Though Dana gave people Legos for speaking, very few people (including two from our team) came up to speak. Only one person (Kesten, see below) gave a demo. More pictures from the 2013 OpenStack Hackathon are in my photo gallery.
I am no front-end developer, but nobody else in our team clamored for that role. In a strange coincidence, the other 4 women on our team came either from PyLadies (Python was their language of choice) or from scientific computing background, or the intersection of both. So I assigned the front-end developer role to myself, fully realizing that a web-page hand-coded by me would look rather... homemade. I needed some HTML and CSS templates that would make my creation look at least somewhat professional. Specifically, I needed a web form. I spent a good couple of hours looking for HTML/CSS templates for forms, and most sites were misleading: either they promised free templates, but every template you picked required you to sign up for a fee; some websites promised form templates, but instead of providing the HTML/CSS code they let you create and host a form in their domain, which wasn't what I wanted. After a long search I was able to find a form where I could tease out its HTML/CSS code. Interestingly, throughout my numerous Google searches, Bootstrap didn't show up even once. But when I mentioned my predicament to the people at the hackathon and on Facebook, two of them recommended Bootstrap. Indeed, Bootstrap has form templates. Face-to-face interaction can still be more useful than Google.
The one and only product demo at the hackathon was given by Kesten Broughton, who created a 2D altitude chart as an addon for Google Maps "get directions" service using the Python beta API. His program was called Picycle, and was intended as a service for bicyclists who want to choose an optimal route, either minimizing or maximizing (if they want a good workout) the hills along the route. More pictures from the 2013 OpenStack Hackathon are in my photo gallery.
It took me 3 hours to put together a basic -- extremely basic -- front end to our application. There was no even a question of hooking it up to the backend. There was no time to write even a primitive web service that the front-end could call and display some results. One person in our group, more experienced with Python, finally got Twitter authentication to work in Python. This allowed her to query Twitter API programmatically by making requests from her Python code. Other of our members were just starting out with programming in general (in some cases switching from other professions), so I don't know what they did during that time. Perhaps they were going through Codecademy courses.
To our credit, other teams did not seem to fare better. Only one of the hackathon attendees had even a minimal product at the end to give a demo of, and he admitted he had been working on that product for 2 weeks already. His name was Kesten Broughton, and he created a 2D altitude chart as an addon for Google Maps "get directions" service using the Python beta API. His program was called picycle, and was intended as a service for bicyclists who want to choose an optimal route, either minimizing or maximizing (if they want a good workout) the hills along the route.
The lesson to be learned here is that to participate meaningfully in a hackathon requires quite a bit of preparation. If All Girl Hack Night is going to have a hackathon (I've been threatening to organize one, but always felt woefully unprepared), we would need to prepare in advance. For example, some us will have to be team leads who will have studied the API's of our choice (the APIs will also have to be decided ahead of time), and will be able to guide the teams so they could make tangible progress. That's the main lesson. Lots of advance decisions, planning what to implement, what programming languages and APIs to use, and a critical number of people who are familiar with those technologies and can guide others.
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