Global Hackathon, Team Bermuda

Last weekend I took part in the global hackathon run by koding.com as part of Team Bermuda aka Three ace-boys and an ace-girl.

The other members of the team were:

• Nick Hoskins, the one who told us all about it
• Beckett Simmons, residing koding.com expert
• Veronica Windus, working remotely from the frozen wastes of Canada

The idea was to create a web based application in 48 hours. There were five themes to choose from, we chose:

No one reads the fine print (ie TOS, EULA, legal documents) anymore
yet every site has them. Devise a creative/interactive solution.

So, before we could start we needed a name.

Since the average EULA is about as easy to read as the classic, James Joyce' Ulysees we took the liberty of borrowing the name, and then abusing it and came up with, Eulasees.

There is a tenuous link with Bermuda in that many songs of Thomas Moore who lived in Bermuda for a while, are cited in the works of James Joyce.

So, back to the hackathon. This nominally started at 4am Bermuda time on Saturday 6th December. Team Bermuda hence decided to start work at 10am, gathering at the Watford Sports Club.

In fact, things got off to a slow start due to several factors:

• lack of coffee.

  Actually, there was coffee, but we only had a tiny bodum to make it in.

• A fellow Blade turned up at the sports club.

  These days, blades are rare as hen's teeth, so progress came to a complete standstill whilst yours truly reminisced about the good old days when the Mighty Blades were in the heady heights of the first division (technically, they are still in the first division, it is just that now first really means third, English footy uses a weird number system).

• At least one of us working on a laptop that was missing lots of the standard development packages.

• Flaky wifi.

• No real idea what we were going to do.

This was very much a make it up as you go along event. We talked about a few ideas, delegated lots of stuff to our ace-girl, who was presumably still digging out from under a snow storm.

The rough plan was a to create a restful API with django and build an angular.js front end.

The idea was to load EULA's into the system, allow users to highlight areas of text and apply tags to these areas.

These tags would have a short name indicating what the contract clause really meant and a longer text body explaining what it was all about really.

Once we had this and some data in the system the plan was to create some views allowing users to see which EULA's had which clauses and other such fun stuff. One idea was to add a quiz, getting people to guess whose EULA had which clause, possibly using django quiz.

For most of Saturday we pretty much ignored the koding.com virtual machine, we were having enough other problems.

Actually, the angular stuff was going quite well.

The django side was going a bit slower. We were using cookiecutter to create all the base files for our django apps and project. This works really well, but does come with a lot of extra goodness that we probably did not need at this point.

pip install kept failing on obscure compile errors due to missing -dev packages. I love pip, but with a big requirements list and a dodgy wifi connection the downloads were taking way too long and I couldn't get it to cache things reliably. More on this later.

Having said that, being able to do:

python setup.py register

Followed by:

python setup.py publish

To make the django app available on PyPi (and hence pip install magic just works), was very cool.

Things went well on the Saturday. Mid-evening we stopped for food and more coffee (by now Nick had brought a decent sized bodum down from his house, so the coffee shortage was averted).

We decided to work until we were too tired, then get some sleep ready to code until 4am on Monday morning.

It is all a bit of a blur now, but at some point we decided we should see if any of our stuff actually works on koding.com.

I am sure the koding.com IDE is a joy to use, but now was not the time to learn it. Fortunately, Beckett had given us the number one pro-tip for using koding.com:

Getting ssh to koding working is well worth the effort

Further, it didn't involve anything more than adding an ssh key to the ~/.ssh/.authorized_keys file.

Suddenly pip install was flying along. Clearly, we should have been doing everything on the koding machine.

Having noted how well the koding VM was working, of course, we continued to work locally.

We were, in fact, so effective at this that it was midnight on Sunday before we decided it would be a good idea if the angular front end could talk to the django rest API.

No prizes for guessing the answer to this: hell no.

Angular was either failing completely to connect to the django API giving obscure messages about cross-site request forgery

At this point we probably should have left the angular front end as an example of where we were heading and just fed it some toy data.

Instead we learnt way more about csrf's than we ever wanted to know, in between cursing django for its attentiveness to security.

After much thrashing around django cors came to the rescue. By now, however, it was past 3am and Nick was having to use a new function to make the restful API calls.

We got the two pieces talking, but ran out of time to fix up enough of the angular code to get a viable front end.

The project code is on github, as eulasees, with the the django eulasees app in a separate repository.

You can also view the docs for the eulasees API that was created. These are created with the amazing django rest swagger and allow you to try out the API.

We did manage to load some data into the system, with the django admin system coming to the rescue as the user interface of last resort.

We should probably apologise to google, since their terms of service was the toy example we decided to use. You can actually get all the data that we entered with this one API call. So, if there are any google lawyers reading: we love you really, we know you are not evil. Just one question: what is with the paragraphs IN ALL CAPS? ARE WE BACK IN THE 90's ON A SHOUTY FORUM?

Remarkably, we got an email yesterday informing us we made it through to the next round of the competition. We can only assume that pretty much everyone that got any sort of site up got through the first round. You can even VOTE FOR US :)