Stacking Code

Last weekend Peter Toms and I teamed up to have a go in HACT '13, a two-day hackathon event in the ACT to create any product using any technology. Our project? Build a web application that draws UML sequence diagrams from short-hand text.

Putting together sequence diagrams with a drawing application can take hours, and it becomes a massive time sink if they have to change frequently. We hated doing it until we were directed to WebSequenceDiagrams, a web application that uses short-hand text to draw them automatically. We love this application, but we think it's a bit pricey, and missing some cool features, so that became our project for the weekend.

Thirty-two hours later, with some sneaky heading home to get some sleep, and I even went and saw a movie with the wife on Saturday night, but we had a basic working application by 4pm Sunday. The whole thing was done from scratch, except for the domain name which was purchased in advance. Everything was up and running quickly thanks to Amazon EC2, RDS and Route 53. You can check out what we built here:

http://buildmydiagram.com/

Overall we had a blast and I think we achieved a lot. No prizes for us, but we did get runner-up in one category. Pete and I plan to keep going with the application, but for now, sleep.

Congratulations to all the winners and a big thank you to all the organisers and participants for a wonderful event, in particular Matt Stimson and Entry 29.