AWS Hackathon
A few weeks back now I attended my first hackathon. For those of you who aren’t exactly sure what a hackathon is here’s my definition. A hackathon is where a group of individuals get together for a day (or more), come up with a few ideas of things they would like to build, pick one idea, and then get down to the business of creating something.
At the hackathon I attended, we decided to create what we ended up calling the ‘Nerd Party Alert’ application. We ended up landing on the idea because one of the attendees decided to bring along a project he had already been working on for a while. He was hacking together a Raspberry Pi with a camera and a screen.
The solution used several AWS services (S3, Rekognition, Lambda, DynamoDB, and Alexa), we tied everything together with Python and also integrated Google Sheets.
Here’s a diagram of what we created.
A little bit of background before we jump into the rest of the article. Outside of myself, none of the attendees had any previous hands-on experience with AWS. Also, each of the attendees (outside of myself) had little hands-on experience with Python.
Looking back on the day - we ended up spending about 14 hours on the project - here’s what stood out to me.
The Power of Managed Services
With little prior experience, the group was able to quickly build a prototype of our idea using multiple AWS services. Recently, I wrote an article about making 2017 the year we turn off as many OS’ as possible. The hackathon reaffirmed to me that this is, in fact, possible.
Reducing Time-to-Market using AWS (and managed services)
One of the biggest benefits associated with AWS (and cloud computing generally) is you can significantly reduce your time to market by leveraging public cloud. I routinely talk to my customers about this, and the hackathon lets me see this in action. We were able to very quickly (in about fourteen hours) build a functioning solution. If we were building something for real, we would be able to use what we made as our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and could approach customers to validate our ideas before spending more time (and possibly money).
The Importance of Security
We followed best practices throughout the entire day. Sure, this made some tasks a little harder to complete, but it helped enforce the importance of building security into your application from day one. As an example, we used IAM Roles to allow our application components access to other AWS services without the need to hardcode credentials (with one exception - more on this later)
Next Steps
Alexa (Voice Computing)
I believe that voice computing (Alexa, etc.) is one of the next big waves of computing. I brought along my Echo because I’m super excited about the possibilities. I didn’t get nearly as far as I wanted to, so I’m going to continue working on this aspect of the solution.
Step Functions
If you watched the wrap-up video, you would have seen one of the attendees (Casey) mention how disappointed he was with Step Functions in AWS. While I agree the learning curve is steep, there is value here. I’m working on another project right now (more on this later), where I’m using Step Functions, and they are incredibly powerful, once you have a basic understanding of how they work.
Another Hackathon
If you’re in Oakville, Ontario (or nearby), and would like to build a project on AWS as a way to learn, get in contact with me. I’m working on setting up another Hackathon now.