week 9 o'Projects
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Live from New York, its…. Weeeek 9!
Hey folks sorry I missed you last week. Things got a little hecktic. Why you ask? Well last week Jorge, Jullian and I competed in our second hackathon. And I am happy to say that we took home a prize!! This hackathon was called Fintech and was focused on financial technology. The hachathon took place over the course of two days. We started Saturday morning and present Sunday afternoon. Julian use to be a trader so he had a good idea about what the financial sector did and didn’t want and as such he took the lead in our team. We settled on building a bitcoin dashboard. The dashboard had real time trade data from mtgox, the largest bitcoin trade market, real time transaction data from blockchain, and tweets abotu bitcoin from stocktwits. We saved the trade data to a mongoDB database and created 1 min candlestick bars using chartIQ. We saved the transaction data to the mongo database as well and took the amount of bitcoins and the ip address( when avalible) to show where bitcoins were being spent around the world. Jorge found a really cool map which would show pings. We put pings at each location where bitcoins were sent from and adjusted the size of the ping to be relative to the amount of bitcoins spent. The core of our design and issues were using the chartIQ graphing API. Once data is given to chartIQ, chartIQ gives you a bunch of really cool analytics functions for your graph. This was the impetus for using chartIQ. During the event, we worked closly with the representative from chartIQ as we ripped apart thier demo graph to load our own real time data. We worked till 4:30 AM on Saturday night and got really stuck getting the data into the graph. We planned to meet back at the hachathon at 8:30 AM to fix everything. If we didn’t we wouldnt have anything to present. Becasue I live so far away I didn’t get to sleep till 6 AM. And, suprise, I did not make it to the hackathon at 8:30. I rolled out of bed at 11:30, semi well rested and join my teamates who were less than pleased with me. My bad guys. Thakfully they were able to ge the data coming into the graph. At 1 groups began presenting. There were 4 judges, all of whom were venture capicalits foucused on financial technology. The judges RIPPED apert the first few groups. They asked tough tough questions about the core business ideas of the product. And we were kind of freaking out. We didn’t have a business idea! Heack, the word dashboard hadn’t been in our head until an our before the presenations started. We were just building to build. So finally we are up next and no one wants to present. Our app hardly worked (the map had disappeared off the dashboard), we were exhausted, and had no business plan. And then the event organizer called our group, and I said, “fuck it guys, we did all this work, we’re presenting.” So I got up, and rambled about what was going on with our app. And people liked it. I don’t remeber much from the presentation but I remember someone saying ‘wowwww’ when I said what the map would do if it had appeared on screen. lol. After my ramble, one of the judges asked, ‘so who do you make money, is there a business here?’ To which I responded, “No.” And sat down. Everyone loved that haha. The true hackers in the room, didn’t appreciate the focus the judges were putting on the business plan, they were more intereted in the technologies people used to build cool things. Despite my brevity with the judges, the representative from chartIQ liked our project and specifically what we had done with his API to grant us a prize. We took home one iPad! I paid JUlian and Jorge for thier part (part of thier part anyway). So now I have an iPad!. The more exciting part was that the chartIQ guy wants to keep working with us to imporve our app and put it online. He gave us access to chartIQ for a year (a $120 value!) and wants to help integrate more chartIQ analytics into the app. Oh and I almost forgot, he wrote a nice little blog about the hachathon and we got a little mention. So ya, basically famous haha.
Ok now that we go that out of the way I can talk about week 9, or as I am calling it, o’Projects. Cuz we’re all working on projects. Get it? I might be too funny. Anyways, I spent the entire week working on a chat app similar to gchat or facebook chat. The idea is that it will be a node web server with a sigle javascript file which other sites can include on thier main application page, and just like that they will have chat for their webpage. Currently I have a working version where people can all talk in one big chat, but haven’t been able to split people out into private chat rooms yet. My code is really really ugly though so I have a big task ahead of me to clean it up and make it better. I think it might take me all week but if I get it done, and do it right it could be really cool project. Thats really all I have to say today.
Cheers, Kyle