2nd Coding Night at BlaBlaCar

In Jan 2015 we organised the first Coding Night in BlaBlaCar, an internal Fun&Serious hackaton. It was a massive success. Remember? That’s were Ride Map (formerly known as Meet your Co-rider) was born, this amazing feature that enable drivers and passengers sharing a ride together to meet more easily at departure point. Then we decided to run a second edition.

It took place on Thursday 24th and Friday 25th of September at BlaBlaCar offices in Paris.

The entire and brand new Polish tech team joined the event in Paris, as well as our Roumanian tech team, our product managers, UX/UI designers and some lonely souls from our Communications team who wanted to join and geek out a bit :)

The concept was simple: create new projects, build something from the very begining, code all night and be together during 24 hours. There were no specific rule and projects could be about BlaBlaCar or not, crazy, serious, useless, for team mates or members, feasible in 24 hours or in 10 years with all of NASA involved.

Let’s dive into these 24 crazy hours

Alain was ready to fight…against tiredness.

To start, every participant who had an idea presented it along with his “recruitment” needs to bring his project to life. We had 47 pitches. 20 teams were created (twice as much as the first Coding Night, which is normal since our tech team doubled \o/). Once everyone found his team and grabbed his special Coding Night T-Shirt, the real game could start!!

After a first stop around 7pm for a couple of beers together, a bunch of pizzas and loads of sushis, the first part of the night was easy.

Team were very enthousiastic and working hard

At 4 am, we were still numerous and awaken

2nd part of the night was somewhat less efficient :)

And suddenly some of us felt asleep…with different techniques

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We still had a lot of time left before the demo. Fortunately, BlaBlaCar is a resourceful company, and we had several yoga and sophrology workshops on the rooftop at sunrise to help us deal with physical and mental fatigue.

It was amazing and really helped us! Thanks a lot to Anne-Laure Paccoud and Marie Lefevre.

The event finally ended with 20 incredible demos and a ton of applause on friday at 2pm. This was a very special moment I will remember for a long time, we were all tired but very excited to discover the projects. We streamed it live for the whole company.

And that’s were the magic happens: as one of the project was an internal voting platform called BlaBlaVote, every employee was invited to vote for his 3 favorite projects! Thx Alain!

And the winners are…

Since we decided to create 3 categories we have 3 winners \o/

BlaBlaCat in the category Fun

by Usman Akeju and Julien Blanc

A konami code with cute cats for BlaBlaCar websites

BlaBlaGood in the category New feature

by Laure Wagner, Michal Fikus, Nicolas Schwartz, Francis Nappez and Etienne Servant

ZeFlow in the category Internal Tools

by Nicolas Menoux, Willy Morin, Pierre Marguerrite

An awesome tool to visualize many axis on a globe, like fillup rate, published trips around the world…

Congrats to the other teams and especially to:

• Travis Tarr, Charles-Henri Vespierre, Nicolas Duval, Erwann Robin and David Ratel for WeekendWizzard, a feature for our app to visualize the 10 main routes (by nb of trip published) departing from your nearest city based on your location
• Cyrille Jouineau, Muriel Lusseau, Gérard Cao, Guillaume Benoît and Fanny Gaborit for BlaBlaEvent, a feature to faciltate identifying and tagging rides going to or leaving from music festivals
• Marius Chincisan, Marek Ruszczyk and Silvia Grisó for BlaBlaTranslate, a series of tool tips to help our Localization team check that all translations are done and don’t break the page layout on each page of each domain
• Alain Tiemblo for BlaBlaVote, an internal election platform
• Pierre-Yves Lebecq and Lucas Didier for BlaBlaVoices, a IOS app that play all employees favorite/typical expression just by clicking on faces
• Daphné Popin, Jordane Colin and Baptiste Gios for their video game Save the ride sharers
• Pierrick Caen and Benjamin Retourne for UglyFaces, a POC on how to integrate Google Face detection API to block some profile photo upload when matching some criteria (got glasses, 2 persons, not human face)
• Hotel bookings by Wojtek Wiktorowicz, Blazej Kraszewski and Alexandru Pitis, or how to display hotels offer retrieved from Booking.com api after booking a ride on BlaBlaCar
• Face Watch on Android by François-Xavier, the implementation of a Face watch on an android watch
• Blabla Foundry by Jean-Marc Charles and Nicolas Tricot, an internal crowdfunding platform to promote all kind of internal projects
• Bug Box by Maxime Deprieck, a system to have fun alerts (sound, revolving light, LED screen messages, slack messages…) when a CI test suite fails
• Bouzouc the Public Transporter by Mathieu Louafi](/authors/#author-mathieu-louafi) (the same guy that invented the project name Totor last year), a POC on how we could integrate public transport route to go from passenger home address to the departure point
• BackoCalendar by Lucian Dobre, an internal calendar app to display the schedule of our Member Relation Team members per country!
• Play with OpenbeerMap by Olivier Dolbeau, a POC with Open Street Map data and beers
• Oleg Serbin for Pick up the ride sharer, a video game where you drive a car through the forest and you must pick up ridesharers along the path and avoid trees
• Marius Palade and Andrei Penciu for BBC Developer Companion, an interactive installation script that can be used to install everything required on a new machine
• Usman Akeju for Static Analysis Tool

And last but not least: you want to be part of next Coding Night? Join us we’re hiring!