Fiware Hackathon Italia: we (almost) won again!

FIWARE is an international consortium working to develop a European alternative to American cloud infrastructure, a sector where Amazon dominates everyone else.

The Fiware initiative rests on a few pillars designed to promote the technology among developers: Fiware Lab, Fiware Ops, Fiware Accelerate, Fiware Mundus.

IMPACT is a European accelerator that is investing 2.5 million euros in startups built on Fiware technologies. The technology and infrastructure are promoted to different professionals (developers, designers and entrepreneurs) through hackathons in several countries.

After the Madrid event last September, on April 10 and 11, 2015 it was Florence's turn. The event kicked off with a generous breakfast offered by the organizers, which gave us a chance to meet the other competitors and ease the tension a little.

After the day's schedule was announced and a short introduction to the technologies, we formed teams over lunch, ours included! I was struck by how some teams came together spontaneously among people with different professional skills who had never met before. The relaxed atmosphere throughout the event certainly helped, despite the fairly substantial prizes.

I want to stress this because I have to admit I didn't expect an experience like this from an initiative I considered very "business oriented"; a sign that even the largest organizations are starting to realize the potential that young people, enthusiasts and nerds have to offer.

Our own team included (besides me and Francesco Disperati from Cantiere Creativo) my former captain Giovanni Bajo from Develer and Elise Cicognani, a very young web designer we met that same morning.

Once the introductions were over, we were taken to the open space of Buongiorno (the company hosting the event), where we could start developing our ideas for the remaining 18 hours.

It all started with a short brief in which we decided to develop an idea from our newest member, Elise, who, drawing on a background in art studies, had come up with a mobile app to promote tourism in Florence (and potentially anywhere!) through a game.

The Art!Quest app is a trivia game: it asks a series of questions on art and culture, with 3 difficulty levels. To answer a riddle, you have to find the answer by physically going to the monument or artwork you think is the correct solution, within a time limit. When you answer, geolocation tells you whether you're right.

On the technical side, we decided to use:

• the FIWARE platform for all the infrastructure
• the rich Open Data collection of the Comune di Firenze for information on the monuments
• the GIN web framework for Go for server-side development
• Facebook's JavaScript framework React for client-side development

I'm happy with how we split the roles: we managed to be productive, working independently while still communicating very well on the integration side.

Throughout the event, the organizers pampered us with snacks and all kinds of drinks. After all, brains burn fuel! At some point during the night a really fun atmosphere took hold, with super nerdy jokes, friendly jabs with the other teams, music blasting at full volume and lots of laughter. :D

The moment of truth came with Saturday's sunrise: every project had to be presented and judged on three key aspects: design, technical features and business plan. Each team presented its project to the panel, trying to highlight what made it unique.

The first reward came when Francesco and I won the best developers award, for our technical choices, execution and code quality.

Shortly after, with everyone exhausted and the room eager to hear the results, came the announcement of the top 3 projects. Hearing our name called for second place was truly satisfying and an unexpected surprise that made all the effort worth it!

The full team: Giovanni Bajo, Francesco Disperati, Elise Cicognani, Lorenzo Masini

This wasn't our only win! A few months ago, again with Francesco and our Cantiere colleagues, we took part in the Rails Rumble, an international contest with 600 participating agencies specializing in ruby and ruby on rails.

The Rumble demands even more: 48 hours with (almost) no sleep, writing code and coordinating with four other people, was truly exhausting! Here too, the satisfaction of a second place more than made up for it! The HiGuys! app is still used by remote teams around the world who like the idea of being able to "see" each other.

Knowing that an app built in just two days is still reliably online and used by 3000 people every month makes us really want to enter a new contest as soon as possible... this time, though, to come in first! :)