Wikimedia Hackathon Vienna 2017 & Prague pre-hackathon

Had a blast at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna! 🙂 A few of us also got together for a pre-hackathon in Prague a few days before the start of the hackathon, courtesy of our hosts (Wikimedia Czech Republic).

Prague pre-hackathon

 

We worked together from the 12th to the 16th of May in Wikimedia Czech Republic’s co-working office. 5 days and several svíčkovás later, we produced:

A map of nearby places that need pictures!

Every pin on that map is a Wikidata item that needs pictures. You can scroll around and browse, or you can select an item to get more information about it, or directions to it. (Many thanks to Mapbox for their API)

 

 

Also… a navigation drawer!

So very much better than using an overflow menu in the action bar. ‘Nuff said.

Users can now view the coordinates of their uploaded image, and date of upload.

Also, we added a logout option, and are now giving users the option of choosing how many of their previous uploads they would like to view on the main screen.

Flyers were created to publicize the app in the hackathon, videos were made, breathtaking sights were seen… oh, and Adam wrote a blog post covering the pre-hackathon, too.

Wikimedia Hackathon Vienna

 

After a short break, we met up again (in Vienna this time!) for the Wikimedia Hackathon (19 – 21 May). While we possibly weren’t as prolific during the hackathon, some memories that stand out in my mind include:

• Learning how to detect and fix memory issues in our app from Dmitry Brant (Wikipedia Android app team).
• Introducing new contributors to working on the app – Adam Baso and Fitos made their first commits on our Android app GitHub repo (welcome guys!)
• Being given UI help and pointers by Rita and Pau
• The tremendous amount of support shown by the community during our slot at the open mic and showcase 🙂
• Being taken around Vienna by Praveen and Tobias on the final night, including an amazing Italian dinner
• Realizing that no matter how excited I am about a new patch, I should NOT push anything to production without going through beta (oops. sorry all those who crashed!)

 

Thank you

To the folks at Wikimedia Czech Republic (Vojtech, Jan, Petra, Martin, and others) who tirelessly worked to make the pre-hackathon happen, hosted us in their office, helped us with whatever we needed and showed us around Prague: Thank you.

To my team who put up with me at the pre-hackathon and hackathon (Neslihan, Vivek, Dinu, Tobias, Adam Shorland, John, and hopefully I haven’t forgotten anyone…): Thank you.

To the Wikimedia Hackathon organizers and scholarship committee, and the wonderful people we worked with at the hackathon (Dmitry, Rita, Johann, Pau, Adam Baso, Fitos, etc): Thank you.

It was all amazing, and I hope to do it all over again next year. 🙂

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The Commons app is free to use, no ads. You can download it here.

We are resolving a few bugs with the new improvements listed in this post, so the new features are currently only available in beta. Anyone can sign up for beta testing here. When the bugs have been resolved, the new features will be released to everyone.