#hearstfashionhack

[mediawirelp]

Continued from Part I, after a full night of hacking.

[mediawirelp]

Bridging the fashion and tech communities in New York City

[allelsefails]

THANK YOU #HEARST, GILT and ANGELHACK

[iamrgon]

gilt-e-pleasure, a Hearst Fashion Hack product

This past weekend, I participated in the Hearst Fashion Hack at the Hearst Tower for a 24 hour blend of fashion and technology. Along with Jeff Uthaichai and Steve Skladany, I built gilt-e-pleasure, an app that enables you to browse products for sale on Gilt and allows you to get it later by being loaned the money when you sign a promissory note agreeing to pay within 7 days or get hit with a $15 late charge! We ended up winning the DocuSign 1st place prize and giving the judges and audience a good laugh!

This was the first hackathon I attended without an idea for a disruptive service beforehand. I have to admit, I felt unprepared; as if I only showed up for the food, beer, and the overall good time characterized by a hackathon. Contrary to my feeling of unpreparedness, this allowed my teammates and I to really think outside the box.

Around 2:30 pm, we began tossing ideas around of things we could build with the sponsor APIs. An hour later and after much deliberation regarding whether to build a Windows 8 app (in my experience, less than 5 teams try developing for Windows 8 thus making it the easiest prize to win), we refined our app to what is now, gilt-e-pleasure. 

Without a full 24 hours to code, we quickly got down to work and divided the work. Steve started designing the UI, Jeff set up the repository and server, Katie (Steve's wife who pitched in big time during our brainstorm session) wrote the promissory note, and I began setting up the project structure. 

As Steve continued to design the interface, Jeff and I divided the API integration work — he took DocuSign and I took Gilt. Gilt's API gives you access to all the content on their site; you hit the active sales endpoint and you get all the sales organized by departments. Also included in each sale is the API endpoint for the details for each product.

This was a problem – there were 78 sales and about 20 products a piece. Steve was crafting a tile-based UI and I knew he might want to add infinite scrolling (contrary to my thoughts), so loading by hitting the API all the time wouldn’t be fast. Instead, I made the roughly 1560 API calls and cached the results for 2 days in a format I could return quickly.

By 10 pm, Steve had wrapped up the first version of the UI, Jeff had the DocuSign integration working, and I was wiring up Steve’s design with data. Overnight, we worked on refining the site design and making it faster. With 2 hours before submission, Jeff bought the gilt-e-pleasure.com domain and updated the DNS records.

Meanwhile, I was working on the biggest hack of our hack! For every Gilt product, I did a keyword search for the ten latest Elle articles on the brand via the Hearst API. For each unique author, I searched on Twitter for the author by name via Twitter’s API (this was a pain to setup without taking the user through Twitter authentication) and found the Klout score for the first 5 relevant Twitter accounts that could potentially be the author.

I created an algorithm that computed the average Klout score and gave more weight to a Klout score for a Twitter screen name that was a concatenation of the first name and last name (for me that would be RafaelGonzaque, GonzaqueRafael, Rafael_Gonzaque, or Gonzaque_Rafael) and the amount of articles the author wrote that mentioned the brand. The gist is that this measure is the average influence effect for that product on social media, so we could refer to it as the buzz factor.

Unfortunately, time ran out and we couldn’t incorporate the buzz factor into the UI to filter products by it. The plan was to allow showing products that had articles written about them by Elle authors with Klout scores above a threshold you defined. I’m going to include it in the UI within the next couple of days, so lookout for it!

So there you have it! From idea to implementation to concept in less than 24 hours. Give it a shot and leave feedback in the comments. We are not saving data on the site, so you can go ahead and sign the document. We promise not to pursue legal action. :)

A shot of Jeff and I demo-ing courtesy of @TravelingAnna

[allelsefails]

and also misquoted twice. I guess this comes with the territory. 

[allelsefails]

I may have used you in my demo :) please like our team immediately so we can win! http://www.hackathon.io/clothes-it #hearstfashionhack (at Hearst Tower)

[rawbee]

Napping after a long night at #HearstFashionHack. (at Hearst Tower)