Team members
Abstract
This is the real deal.. Prepare your battery, connect to a good network to get thousands of SMS. Whoever you are, maybe you come from a faraway land, maybe you don’t understand my language, maybe you are from a country that I never heard the name of…
One thing is for sure, you will get the SMS. So, whoever you are, wherever you are, our app has special skills which will make this world easier for you, starting with getting an SMS 📲🤩
Having such nice days during our Hackdayz did not prevent us from thinking into adding more practical benefit to our company by improving the current app. And after we had our lunch, we had the power to start working, nevertheless, my vegetarian lunch did not taste good at all.
Our aim was by the end of Hackdayz that the app should be released in PlayStore and the code should be made as open-source for further improvements!
Side Notes
The app should have:
- Rules: number and where it should be posted
- Environment: Slack, Email, and others…
- Some new settings: such as the ability for the user to set a password… (we were so optimistic)
Agenda
- What is the problem you want to solve?
- Who experiences that problem?
- How do you want to solve that problem?
- Why is this a better solution?
Having such a funny combination of a team with a front-end developer and test manager trying to develop an android app included so much fun these days, as we were literally underdogs. But, just to get our spirit up, we went to the gym, and then to the sauna where I could not even see my hands, and finally to the swimming pool.
Although, we were so ambitious that we set our plan to create an app with an infinite number of environments, and with so flexible rules (such as amateur dreams). After some time as Thomas A. Edison stated “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”, we realized that we are not gonna create the app as it actually was planned 🤯. Nevertheless, the days were cool enough to make us laugh while we were failing for several times.
Youssef was really ambitious that he told me “I will never go to bed mad. I’m gonna stay up and fight!”. After 10 minutes, each of us went to his room to sleep 😴. Due to the effort, I spent during 3 hours in the gym, sauna, and swimming, I wanted to sleep because by looking at my hand I couldn’t recognize how many fingers I did have.
The next day, we started working again. I wanted to start now with my real work since when kings start the party 🎉, my first task was to find a beautiful design. I decided to choose a simple design due to the time pressure. Besides improvisation is too good to leave to chance.
GitLab Repository
And using the mentioned GitLab we were able to create the app.
https://gitlab.com/47northlabs/public/sms-to-slack
Results
We were somehow not so much satisfied with the results, actually shocked 😱😱😱!!!
- The app has been developed with the ability to add up to 5 environments. Unlike what we have expected to reach an infinite number of environments.. such youth dreams 😅
- The app could not set the email as one of the environment due to inability to find a library via which the app can send the message to the email while it is in the background…. experience is simply the name we gave our mistakes 😄
Conclusion and implication
The app has been created successfully and applied to one of our android devices using +41 76 75x xxxx.
Future features and challenges would be…
1. Adding email as a new environment. Let us see how this gonna be manageable 🤔.
2. Adding a password for the app. We are still so optimistic 😁.
3. Adding the ability to add more (unlimited environments) with the recycle bin 🧹 to remove them when needed.
By the end of the day, I just was totally shocked f the difference between what has been planned and what actually has been achieved. But, it was just a funny and exhausting experience.
