Under The Hood Of My Hack24 Entry

I competed by myself at hack24. I don’t see competing alone as a massive issue personally, as it cuts down communication overhead by a massive amount. ;)

For those that haven’t heard of hackathons before, the concept is fairly simple:

• Teams of 1-4 people.
• Multiple challenges (at least in this event)
• 24 hours to build a solution.
• Only code you have written during the event (or Open Source libraries/apps) can be used.

It is quite gruelling to compete in these types of events; you have limited time and you need to prioritise your time across features and components carefully so you don’t end up with a complete backend but no frontend or similar.

Generally you omit anything that is not-essential such as login systems, logging or some error checks etc.

I used the event to test some of the ideas and applications (Microservices, RabbitMQ, Riak, Nginx, php-fpm etc) I have been using on larger projects in a smaller time constrained project - and I think the outcome proves that it works.

I am a big fan of microservices; breaking your app into small testable components with fixed interfaces is awesome for quick building and easy debugging - want to test if something is working, inject a message into the input and see what the outputs are. Once working you can mostly treat it as a single component and move onto the next piece. It keeps your mind focused and, at least for me, reduces stress.

I am a long-time PHP coder and so it made sense, when it came to quick prototyping, to use this and the lightweight Vultr VPS [disclosure: url contains affiliate link].

[caption id=”attachment_235” align=”aligncenter” width=”206”] SMS proxy - my hack24 entry[/caption]

I broke the project into 4 main parts:

• Frontend (website, sms callback hook for receiving messages from [Esendex](http://www.esendex.co.uk/) (the challenge sponsor))
• Receiving worker (take messages from callback and lookup entries in Riak and route to next processing step either filter or directly to sending worker)
• Filter (responsible for transforming the message before routing the message to the sending worker)
• Sending worker (responsible for sending the message out via Esendex)

I am open-sourcing the code as a learning tool for other people (and perhaps so I can abuse it in later events…)

[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ondR-bqwcUY’]

You are welcome to ask any questions and I will do my best to answer them.

If you want to contact me, please use twitter or email mike @ technomonk . com