First Coding Night in BlaBlaCar
Here we go!
In January, BlaBlaCar hosted its first internal coding event ever… 24 hours of non-stop coding, whatever the project, whatever the technology. Just code from Friday 2pm to Saturday 2pm. It was amazing to see how highly involved were all those teams to transform their great ideas into working projects.
Why?
The idea of running a coding event has been around for quite a while, but only in late November we comitted on doing the first (thanks to the engineers, who pushed towards this).
The concept was based on 4 main ideas:
- Give priority to unlimited creativity: everybody had about a week to propose a project of any kind
- Mix teams: everybody can choose with whom to work with from whatever team…
- Create ownership, thus allowing people to “think it, build it” and make it available for “use it”…
- Have fun!
How?
The show started with a 2 min pitch of each of the 25 proposed projects (no imposed link to BlaBlaCar). Then 11 teams formed freely (even single-person teams were allowed) and the hacking could start. Following 24 hours of coding, the remaining teams had to present their work.
24 loooooooooooong hours of coding…
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…followed by our office management team that prepared some delights to survive…
Time to sleep?
Staying up all night long is a challenge by itself:
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After effort comes comfort! The breakfast was the perfect moment to have a break, to exchange on the different projects’ progress and to recharge the batteries.
And the winner is…
3… 2… 1… time is over! We all met once again, exhausted but curious about the outcome of the projects. 8 teams presented their projects (meaning that we lost only three during the night).
And here’s the TOP3, selected by all remaining participants on Saturday afternoon:
3rd place: TOTOR
by Mathieu Louafi
A tool to suggest smart stop-overs for a BlaBlaCar trip.
2nd place: Feature Flags
by Benjamin Fraud, Olivier Dolbeau
A backoffice tool to enable/disable BlaBlaCar features using simple rules.
The winner project: Meet your co-riders
by Alexandra Tritz, Charles-Henry Vespierre, Zsolt Mark, Clément Vasseur, Erwann Robin, Saad Bouchehboun
A tool to geolocalize your co-riders as a driver or passenger.
…and the others
Many thanks to all brave participants:
- FX (BlaBlaBuzzer)
- Benoît, Benjamin De Bernardi, Charles-Henry, Jérémy, Mathieu Morlon, Yassine (BlaBlaDrone)
- JP, Nicolas Esneault, Oleg, Pierre, Raphaëlle, Rémy (FollowMe)
- Marius Chincisan, Matthieu Moquet (Openl10n)
- Marius Palade (Docker)
- Christian, Francis, Frédéric Dermer, Simon, (BlaBlaFaces)
- Nicolas Tricot (iTunes Lib Maze)
Conclusion
This event was a big success in terms of team spirit, awesome ideas and energy level. This coding night was also a test run for an all-BlaBlaCar Hackathon, that eventually might come in 2015!
And last but not least, we’re hiring !
