Romain Pouclet

EcoHackMtl 2013

A lot of things changed in my life recently, all of them being part of our will of being more responsible, helping communities and making the right choices. That’s why I really loved the concept of EcoHackMtl: Montreal’s first Urban Sustainability hackathon. It was held today and it was awesome.

The organization

First, I’d like to thank all the people behind the organization, from what I heard, they started planning the whole thing in november last year. I arrived at 9 and was ready to start with an internet connection, some coffee and a bagel at 9h10. Lunch at 12h30, end of the challenge at 16h30 and a couple of interesting interventions during the day.

Our project

My teammates had already retrieved loads of data about food resources in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighborhood. Our goal was to find a way to aggregate those and put them on a map. Simple as that. This project was even more interesting as HoMa is the district of Montréal we’ve been living in since June, Camille and I. We had a GIS expert in our team who chose to use Google TableFusion, a service I’ve never heard about before this week. We wanted to use OpenStreetMap but as Google Maps is providing a way to integrate with TableFusion, we reconsidered. Some PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript and a heroku hosted app later, we had a buggy prototype up and running.

Conclusion

It’s been a while since I’ve actually been working on a web application, as I’ve been working as a full-time iOS developer since march. My teammate was not really a web developer either, and not one us has actually toyed with TableFusion before, so this is probably the dirtiest code I have ever written. We talked at the end of the day about our prototype and already made some decisions about the next version.

Most importantly, it was a really great opportunity for me to meet other people and work on something useful. I’m looking forward to participating to more hackathons in Montreal. A quick search showed me I missed one at the top of the olympic tower, damn.