On the 1st and 2nd of March, we attended the Leicester Civic Hack weekend, our good friends at Dock provided the location and excellent catering for the event. We went along primed to get stuck in, eager to use our development techniques, expertise and technology to inspire and ultimately produce something functional.
We are particular proponents of the Agile Manifesto, so early software release was very much one of our main goals.
The problem we were working to solve, was to find a way of letting people in the city know of bus delays, and also provide an opportunity for them to complain if their buses were late. Our solution, ‘Mista Bus’, tackled both of these issues by providing data capture from a mobile device and a back-service (our speciality) to store, aggregate and present the data.
The weekend turned out to be very productive. Our team, (which included us here at VI, Aaron Wardle from Swipe and Tap, Alex Vasile from Okotto, and students from the university) gelled well together, and at the end of the weekend had managed to produce live web and iOS applications with professionally designed graphics and layouts. There was also an Android application in development, but it was unfortunately left unfinished as some members of the team couldn’t be at the event for both days.
Overall we found our first hackathon to be a very positive experience, we met some great people, and realised that the city has a great community of ‘techies’ and people passionate about Leicester. In this spirit, we have decided to release the code to the community, and have made it available via a GPLv2 licence. The code can be found on GitHub.