Accio Nimbus

Find your way, everyday!

Inspiration

I remember the first time Shu looked at me. He couldn t contain himself. 2 words popped out of his mouth. Those words will remain forever as our team name: Sparky Lashes. Jokes aside, our inspiration came from the fact that google trip was supposed to be a big hit, but it failed. Miserably. We tried to better it. We succeeded. Then we failed. Stay tuned for our story...

What it does

Everything, but what s supposed to actually do. Getting attractive locations? CHECKED. Getting distances? CHECKED. Routing? Double checked. Improving travel time? Well...we are all about sightseeing. We take our time.

How we built it

Sleepless hours, spilled blood and dead bugs are no far from the truth. Coming from a background involving hardcore C#-ing, C++ and Django, we thought about using none of those! 24 hours, of which 23 trying to understand what we were actually typing and one to write this epic story... Our salvation came in the form of API-s and open source. We will never forget our stranger friends. Not only we made the web, but it actually runs.

Challenges we ran into

Crazy words, blue screen due to 100+ tabs and sleep deprivation. Not to speak about each and single new line of code. At one point, Facebook refused our conversations. We thought about using git. But it was not hardcore enough. While we were trying to figure out javascript...we got into jquery.. We tried to run away from it, but we weren't fast enough. During morning hours, we had a moment of weakness in which we just collapsed. We woke up 15 minutes later, with no memory of our code. Of course, this did not stop us! We had to keep fighting! We had to prevail! Cheap version of red bull after cheap version of redbull and we were closer and closer to deploying our project. One thing we forgot. We forgot to learn Chinese (Microsoft Cognitive Services).. little did we know..

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We can type jquery in 3 different ways. We added 3 more languages, including a bit of Chinese. We mumbled-jumbled our way thought this hack. We proved ourselves brave and limitless. We attended countless challenges, being involved in machine learning and competitive programming as well as in actually finishing our hack. We even won some points for our houses.

What we learned

Except for the languages, to trust each other. I mean, I found it hard at first to let another pair of hands mess with my code.

What's next for Accio Nimbus

Fixing the totally not existing bugs. Solving the NP-complete part of it. Some glory along the way. Voice integration for ease of access and semi-AI just to take a part of the challenge of deciding what to visit next. We consider ourselves community inclined, therefore we will provide a way of gathering parties for sightseeing. The users would be able to rate guides and propose trips. And, of course, our services will always have a free version.

Carry on and accio Nimbus!