Showing posts with label atelier. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atelier. Show all posts

Sunday, April 3, 2016

Go Code Colorado

Go Code Colorado is a state-wide event to innovate on top of Colorado open data. Android Atelier went to Challenge Weekend in Fort Collins.

Preparation

We wanted to use CartoDB to visualize the geo data on the map, so we went to Maptime Boulder to learn about it.

Also, I baked cookies.

Data

How are we going to create value? By showing multiple sets of data on the same map.

The different layers made it very easy to parallelize the work. We looked at different data sets and scrubbed the geo data to put it on the map.

Here is our working demo:

Presentation

Go Code Colorado 2016 centers around the problem statement:

Create an app and business concept that helps businesses build a competitive strategy.

Our app shows agricultural, demographics and logistics data allowing businesses decide where to set up shop. Here is our presentation:

Winners

Two teams advances per location to the final round.

SWO

SWO, or Shop Women Owned, crosses the Colorado business entities with the Social Security Number gender data to showcase women-owned businesses in Colorado. They had a great pitch, and made us realize that we were taking the problem statement too literally.

At the end of the day, this is a business pitch competition. Helping businesses build a competitive strategy (Where will I play? How will I win? Is it worth it?) was not a hard requirement. As long as public data is used, any business plan is fine. In this case, SWO promotes women-owned businesses in bulk, without necessarily helping them build a competitive strategy individually.

Colorado Well Spot

Colorado Well Spot aggregates public data to help oil and gas companies figure out where they should operate. You would think that they would check and make sure not to drill too close to a school, or right of top of a pipeline. Turns out the data is scattered all over the place, and there is not really a good way to do a comprehensive check.

Emily Hueni, the leader of the team, is a GIS specialist with oil and gas experience, and really understands the problem. Once she started talking about the app, we knew they were going to win!

CartoDB

CartoDB is really nice. I like how I can extrapolate from my existing knowledge of SQL and CSS to customize my map. Even though we did not win, we had lots of fun exploring and visualizing the data.

Saturday, August 8, 2015

AT&T IoT Hackathon Boulder

Last week I went to the AT&T Internet of Things Hackathon in Boulder with Brenda, Sepideh and Joan from Android Atelier. After a very intense 24 hours, we won!

A part of Android Atelier is to encourage everyone to document what we do. For this event, we recorded it three ways: blog, sketchnote and video!

Blog

Sepideh wrote a very detailed account right after she got back, and then a follow-up on how to control the Harman speakers once our prizes arrived!

Sketchnote

I wanted to visualize the ups-and-downs we went through at the hackathon, so I made an annotated graph.

Video

Brenda made a video with our demo, the winning announcement, bloopers and various tidbits from the hackathon.

Source code

github.com/AndroidAtelier/nfc-hunt

The sound only works with Harman speakers, but the NFC part should work as is. I got some NFC tags as swag from conferences. If you don't have them, try hotel key cards or luggage tags. Let me know if they work.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Android Atelier: Lunch In code review

I started an intermediate Android study group with Women Who Code Boulder/Denver called Android Atelier. Our goals are:

  • Explore new techniques
  • Learn from each other
  • Contribute to open source

Hackathon

Our first meetup was on June 9. We brainstormed for our first project, and decided to enter a hackathon together. It was a great way to bootstrap our efforts, using the hackathon to impose a real deadline.

We worked from home after the meetup, keeping in touch on Google Hangout. The time pressure made it a bit stressful, but it was so rewarding to see the group working together and finishing the app in 3 weeks!

Here is our entry, Lunch In:

challengepost.com/software/android-atelier-lunch-in

Code review

We met again on July 14 to review what we did for the app. It was a great discussion of the techniques we used:

  • Fragments
  • BroadcastReceiver to detect wifi state change
  • AlarmManager
  • Notifications
  • Custom view
  • Animations
  • Database (using the Cupboard library)
  • SharedPreferences
  • Testing

I made a screen recording of the code review. Check it out:

Source code: github.com/AndroidAtelier/lunch-in (Tag: v0.1.0)