QRSVP - A 24 hour Project

2011-10-16T00:00:00-07:00

Last weekend couple of good friends and I entered our first 24 hour hackathon, the 2011 Yahoo HackU at UCLA. Starting Friday and finishing Saturday we raced to design, implement and test a “hack” to present for judging.

What follows is a (not so) brief account of our adventure. (Skip to the bottom to get to the point.)

Brainstorming
It’s the night before the contest and we get together to toss around some ideas. Automatic journal from social media; doesn’t seem like something we would use ourselves. Geolocated “dashboard” using tons of Yahoo APIs for extra points; feels like an exercise in visualization. Someone mentions an idea for scanning student IDs for ticketing to campus events. The ball is rolling. How about QR codes? It seems like a really easy way to do ticketing. A quick Google search reveals that a few companies are already doing this but most of them look pretty bloated. We think we can do better, we are getting excited.

Off to the Races
The official start time is noon Friday but we don’t start until 4 pm due to classes. Thankfully we have booked a conference room so we have some extra space, privacy and most importantly whiteboards, gigantic whiteboards.

Name Game
It’s time to pick a name, we are already 4 hours behind so we give ourselves a hard deadline of 30 minutes. We fill an entire board with all the nouns verbs and adjectives relating to events, ticketing, barcodes and scanning that we can come up with. Dylan, my teammate is searching domains as we jam different combinations together. I write QRSVP jokingly, combining QR codes which was written all the way on the left and RSVP which was on the right. We laugh but it sticks. QRSVP.to is available and seems like a pretty clever domain. It turns out Tongan domains are somewhat pricey. We are cheap so we register QRSVP.us instead.

Sunset to Sunrise
We define our feature set in terms of required, reach and super reach. The list starts getting pretty long, so we split up tasks and get started. I take on the iOS app which scans and authenticates tickets, Dylan starts work on the backend and Samir and Angela start on the front end. The project off to a great start. By the time we take our first break about 2 hours later we have our API completely defined, a lot of the HTML done and I have an iPhone app which scans barcodes. From here until sunrise we keep at it, running a loop of implementing, testing and debugging. Progress slows considerably after 3 am. We all start feeling a little crazy, it’s time for more coffee. Our major hangups come from authentication both on the site as well from the app and sending the mass emails quickly. Trying to debug these issues with our fading brainpower keeps us till sunrise. Around 6:30 am we take a 2 hour nap. After morning coffee and bagels we have only a few hours to polish before demo time. We fix the rest of our outstanding issues by either making the changes if the bug is small enough or disabling the feature if the fix would take too long.

Final Countdown
We have a working implementation all of our required features and a little bit more. An organizer can visit the site and adds event details and a guest list. When the event is created, guests are emailed an invitation where they can accept or decline. If a guest chooses to accept they will be taken to a ticket page where they can print out their QR code, if the guest is using a smart phone they can simply use the ticket page like a mobile boarding pass. At the event, organizers login into the QRSVP iPhone app and begin scanning tickets to admit guests. Hosts can then visit their event management page to see which guests have RSVPd and which guests have checked in to the event. Dylan pushes final version to Heroku just as the fire alarm goes off. We abandon most of our stuff in the conference room but take our laptops with us to the main hackathon room.

Demo time
The demos are strictly limited to 90 seconds so we race to show off the whole flow of our app. Samir explains as I create an event on screen and send an invite to Angela. She opens the ticket on her phone which Dylan then scans with the iPhone app. We show the event manage page get updated and take a few questions from the judges. The demo feels pretty good.

Epilogue
Unfortunately we didn’t end up winning anything. We did get an honorable mention however for being the most complete project. Overall the experience was a great way to dive into some new technology and stretch our legs on a real project rather than the academic problems we typically face. Plus we ended up with a pretty cool project.

TL;DR:
We built a website & companion iOS app called QRSVP. A portmanteau of QR and RSVP, QRSVP aims to provide a really simple way for small event organizers to manage ticketing using QR codes. It was an absolute blast to build and we hope to have it polished up for wider release in the near future (as midterms allow). In the meanwhile you can check out what we have at QRSVP.us.

Major thanks to my teammates, Dylan Vassallo (@dylanvee), Angela Navarro (@gelgels) and Samir Mody

Prasanth Veerina

QRSVP - A 24 hour Project