Dublin Startup Weekend - Analysis and our Prototype - Hit The Road

Update June 1st 2010: spelling and new link for Hit The Road

I was one of about 50 people at the inaugural Dublin Startup Weekend. The concept is simple: pitch an idea, chose one you want to rally around, develop for 2 days, and launch! I went along knowing two other people, Ross and Fintan, and we decided to develop an idea together. Eugene and Stephen knew Ross and Fintan before the event too: we five would be the team developers. and by the start of Saturday morning we had three more members, our business team: Peter, Colm, and George.

Team Commutable

What was the idea that had pulled in all eight of us: Integrated searching across public transport. Dublin has several forms of public transport, Dublin Bus, DART, and Luas, plus some ancillary services. If you want to make use of all of these in your journey you really need to know the system, it is not possible to put in your start and end address and get a list of buses followed by DARTs that will take you to your destination. Our goal was to provide exactly that service. We formed around the name "Team Commutable"!

Commutable Transport?

Friday Evening

Fintan stood up and pitched the idea, there was some good feedback from the crowd, and we were pleased. We then got to work deciding on what work needed to be done, and what we could achieve in a day and a half of development time. Friday night was a quick pint in the pub, and some chatting with other attendees of the event.

Saturday

On Saturday we really started getting to work. Ruby on Rails was our chosen implementation tech, and it took some finesse to get it working on some of the laptops, but we got there. We really started in earnest to develop. Algorithms and data were our two most used words.

Algorithms and Data

It was a long day, at the end of which we had enough data to work with for testing, a nice clean UI, a good amount of integration with the Google Maps API, and edge computation for our routing algorithm. We all skipped drinks on Saturday determined to be fresh on Sunday morning.

Sunday

We all arrived Sunday morning, bright and early, all except for Eugene. It was then I learned he had stayed up until 6am finishing the algorithm implementation! That man can code. We had a working prototype searching across Luas and DART:

Commutable Sunday Morning Prototype

He arrived in looking remarkably fresh, shortly followed by his supply of red bull for the day:

Eugene's Supply of Red Bull Arrives

A last minute logo, designed by Ross, implemented by yours truly:

Hit The Road Logo

Several more hours of coding, tinkering, and tweaking and we had a working prototype, which we then killed, oops - which meant no live demo for our presentation. It was working literally as Fintan stood up to speak, but it was too late to get it in the final pitch.

The Follow-Up

Hit The Road is live on our prototype server. There is still a very large amount of work to be done, but it is in progress. To get the prototype live we had to self-sign a certificate, which may make Firefox and Safari complain, if you accept the certificate and store it all will be well for the future. This will be removed in the immediate soon.