Sprockets

[ateolf]

Today was the Hackathon at work and I must say this is the best one yet. The last one was kinda lame and boring (for me) though the first one was pretty good (even though there wasn't a lot of coding for me to do). Forming teams and picking ideas beforehand definitely helped matters. Our project was to create an order through the amazon dash button. We settled on merry maids as the product being the easiest and best fit. I'd had an aws account which I'd cancelled and I reinstated it yesterday but I wasn't able to access the IoT stuff as I was getting some junk about my account not being fully set up. Someone else had a working account so I was able to set it up and code lambda functions (in node.js) with that account. We had two of the IoT buttons to play with. I got the task of writing the aws code. So that was pretty cool. There really wasn't a whole lot to that part. I was mostly just making a restful call to a web service John and Mafaz set up on our test server. Oh yeah, the devs for our Hackathon group ended up just being our messaging team (one last hurrah together?). But even though my part was simple I was having a hell of a time getting it to work. Because of firewall rules and amazon continually shifting its cloud ips, I couldn't call our server directly. Luckily, Stephen had set up something very similar for the survey project and was routing calls to us through a proxy server set up on aws. So we were able to use that, but I still had a fuck of a time getting it to work. Ended up asking Stephen for his code snippet doing the calling. I was both relieved and frustrated to see that the core of what I was doing was pretty much the same as his code. He was loading the urls externally so that wasn't in the code. Finally got those and pretty much turned out that I needed the port number to the proxy server. That's what I'd been missing. Close! But it was necessary we got that code from him 'cuz there was one additional piece that required it getting around the certs to work and I'm not sure if I could've gotten that on my own. So yeah, Stephen was our huge help and a uh secret weapon for our team. I was getting worried I'd end up being the missing link when I was spinning my wheels for a while there. But we got it and there were lots of hi-fives. We'd push the button and you'd get an email about the order (faked, but still pretty cool poc, I mean, the email was real but it didn't actually make an order in any system, just got a different name/email address for each of the two buttons we had). The executive team that came and watched our demo seemed pretty into it. We had it timed to three minutes but they stayed a little longer as they kept asking questions and springboarding ideas about it. Felt pretty good about the whole thing. It was actually a lot of fun. Came home and Mary Beth and I watched Orlando which we'd never seen before and was really damned good.