How and why I built The uber of ambulances
About me
I'm Eduardo, a 30 years old software developer passionate about coding.
I like to always be learning new skills languages and technologies.
I have a 7 years of experience developing Web platforms working for a Colombian company
My top 9 skills are: Ruby On Rails, React, Resque, Postgresql, Restful API development, CSS, Shell Scripting, Typescript, ES6
The problem I wanted to solve
In my city there is a problem with the corruption of the health system, there is no control in the moment of dispatch ambulances.
The ambulance companies are fighting each other to pick the patient first because the first one that pick the patient earns some extra money
What is The uber of ambulances?
Like the title says, It is no more than the Uber app but instead of asking for a drive in a car you are requesting an ambulance to go to the place where you are, It has an smart algorithm to dispatch the best ambulance depending of the gravity of the emergency, distance and other variables
Tech stack
Web Platform
Ruby on rails, ReactJS, Web Sockets, HTML5, CSS
Mobile App
Ionic, Sockets, Pusn notifications
The process of building The uber of ambulances
This was an MVP that me and my team have to develop in three days, we were in a coding contest "Hackathon", so we focused in write code the fastest we could.
First we designed the mockups of both parts Web platform and Android App, second I was responsible to develop the API and the Web platform, and the other developer focused in the Ionic app
Challenges I faced
The short time we had, so we had to code without test every single feature of the components, also that days we weren't able to sleep very well because we really wanted to win that contest.
In the technical part we had some compatibility problems because the app was optimized to work in an old version of android, so we spent extra time fixing that.
Key learnings
I learnt a lot about how to start a project from zero and how to manage the time to give priorities to some tasks that are more important .
I would have asked what android version was going to be used before start the development process and I would given priority to the design.
Tips and advice
Don't be afraid of failing, you can create a good startup, demo or MVP in a very short time, all the code we wrote that day was used to the final version of the project. So all this days when we didn't sleep well were not in vain.
Final thoughts and next steps
At the end of this event we won the contest, we were working like 4 months to after the client gave us some new requirements .
Now the project is still running in our city and It have saved lives
