I’ve always been a huge transit nerd – partly evidenced by going to the Transit Tech Hack Day in 2011, and trudging to the TransportationCamp unconference in the snow last winter.
I’ve also been a software developer in a wide number of programming languages and frameworks for the past six years. And I’ve developed a habit of teaching new ones to myself by slapping together some quick transit-related apps using all of the open data and APIs out there.
So when the DCWEEK 2012 hackathon came up and I was pitching potential ideas to my design partner, Laura, the one I argued strongest for was a beautiful, incredibly fast transit-screen app that integrated a number of modes of transportation – specifically Metrorail, local buses, and Capital Bikeshare, as well as things like Car2Go, Zipcar, and Uber.
Now, when most folks come up with a project for a hackathon or code sprint, they create something brand new, fresh, and innovative. And that’s really awesome – the world needs exploration and experimentation.
But Laura and I decided to make a web application that clones some of the functionality of a dozen native apps on everyone’s smartphones. And we wanted to make it run much faster than all of them. And also finish a viable demo of it in just 24 hours.(In retrospect, maybe that wasn’t the best decision.)
But at the hackathon itself, Laura weaved some design magic, and I implemented some crazy caching strategies to make everything work quickly and cut down on API calls. I was able to build the back-end to be quickly responsive with node.js, and we reduced the scope of the project temporarily to get everything done in the time we had.
I was able to make the pitch to the judges that our project not only was awesome, but that we had the unique chance to build a tool that would work as a dependable public service to everyone living in the D.C. metro area. Luckily for us, the pitch resonated well, and we have some prize money to put towards the servers and databases necessary to make this run the right way.
There’s plenty of work left to be done to really capture our vision, but the D.C. development community can help. I’ll be giving a short talk about our project at the Transit Screens Hack Day on Saturday. And I’m excited to get to work to make transit more effective for everyone.
Kyle and Laura won first prize with their multi-modal transit web app at this week’s DCWEEK 2012 hackathon.