Fun times at the #firehack hackathon, sponsered by several Google Developer Groups, Google NYC and WeWork. My first event like this and had so much fun. There were presentations on Google’s Cloud platform and Firebase - a very cool database!
It was nice checking out Google Cloud. I’ve been using AWS to host all of the projects I work on. It’s competitive to AWS and I like their console a lot. I’m looking forward to learning more about the platform. Firebase is pretty awesome. This was not the first time I saw it in use but this time around I kinda got it. I followed their tutorial before the event. It’s super simple but you get the idea.
Most database needs can be addressed, well, with Firebase. What you get in return is an effective database platform that you don’t need to manage. The Firebase API is straight forward. There are SDKs for JavaScript (what I used), Android and iOS, and you can use their API over HTTPS as well.
In summary, using Firebase can make your web application as simple as some HTML and JavaScript. For simple web applications this is pretty awesome.
Since this was a hackathon we needed a project and I came in with an idea to do something that could help charities with their inventory and storage pains. They know they have some number of particular items but there’s no digital inventory or meta-data to help make searching through this inventory possible.
So I worked on this idea with three others and our solution - Charity Spotter. Charity Spotter makes creating an invetory for a charities collected items simple. With a mobile app volunteers can snap photos of items. Metadata about that image, such as what type of object or piece of clothing it is, is generated using an API from Clarifai. We store the metadata in Firebase, the imagine in Google Cloud Storage, and we use App Engine to host our front-end and run backend tasks that index the metadata with Go.
Charity Spotter still has some rough edges but it’s hosted on Github and open source, so hopefully in the near future in can grow into a application that can really help charities with those inventory pains.
It was a great event! My team was an awesome group of people! The event organizers, speakers, mentors and sponsoring organizations orchestrated a fun and productive weekend.