Confirmit Hackathon: Progress Report
12 April 2011
posted by: Paul Quinn on 4/12/2011
Here’s an update on the progress so far in Yaroslavl…With a third of the available time gone, the teams have had some mixed experiences. All started confidently setting short timeframes on initial deliverables, but the reality of some of the challenges has proved difficult to overcome.
The A-Team has made some great progress and has already made a demonstration of dialing from Skype along with call outcome detection. It appears that live audio monitoring is proving challenging (perhaps even impossible?) to achieve, so they have shifted their emphasis to interview recording and jingle sound file playback. Their spirits are high and the team feels the project is going well.
The XXX-Box Team seem to be having a lot of fun! Every time we enter their room they are practicing one of the new gestures for the survey completion, there’s some good collaboration going on here, and some great shapes being thrown! They have spread the work tasks out well amongst the team members and I even had a glimpse of Ivan creating some great looking customized imagery to be incorporated into the final solution—very slick.
Despite the pedigree of the team name, particularly today, Team Gagarin has had to overcome some hurdles. Android development is new to all team members, and the use of the emulators seems to be slowing the development process. Having said that, we’ve just seen a demo of an initial version of the shell showing available surveys and interviewing in one of them. Functionally is looking good, but the interface needs a little sexing-up. Here’s a glimpse of the product running on the Galaxy tablet:
The Mighty Coders have had a troublesome start, with frowns from most of the team members on several of the passing visits that we’ve made. But 5 minutes ago we heard some roars from their room. They’ve turned a corner, and all 5 of the technical problems they were facing (1 for each member) all seem to have been solved in one fell swoop! Nothing demonstrable just yet, but they’ve perked up considerably.
Enthusiasm is high across the board and those of us on the judging committee can already see that it will be a tough competition to select a winner. I’ve also noticed Peter looking enviously on at the teams on several occasions; maybe his decision to be on the judging committee instead of being a participant was wrong?
Glancing out of the office window, the snow is stopping and it’s looking like we will be able to manage journey home on Thursday after all.