Get Noticed competition is starting soon. Only a few days left for registration. If you didn’t do it yet, do it, I assure you that it will be a great experience.

For me, it is already great, I really enjoy writing posts, it allows me to express myself, to give something back to The Internet. Yes, I know, it sounds a bit weird. But most of my professional knowledge comes from the internet, from the Stack Overflow, from the examples on GitHub, from numerous blog posts about various technologies. When I didn’t know much, all these things helped me tremendously. It allowed me to learn at my own pace, I could learn what I wanted to, what was interesting for me or what I needed at work. Everything at a click of a Google Search button.

We are really lucky to live in times when it is so easy to learn all the stuff. You just need time and motivation, and you can create anything, even if you have no idea how.

As for the competition. I have a rough plan as I wrote before. I’ve chosen a project and a technology. I have an idea how to make most of it. There are still some holes here and there, the biggest one probably is figuring out how to get traffic information in a useful form, that I could use in my trip time calculations. But I’ll think about this when I’ll get there, there’s a lot of work to be done before that.

Current plan looks like this:

1. Create parser for the public transport data – I have started working on this already, you can check out my progress on GitHub.
2. Figure out how to transform this data for use in a graph database – here I also have some ideas
3. Create the routing service – this should be interesting
4. Create the timetable browsing service – sounds easy, but I haven’t decided yet how and where to store timetable data, I have some doubts about storing it in Neo4j. We will see.
5. Create an Android client app – that will be fun, and different for me
6. Somehow add traffic data into routing calculations – I have no idea how yet

So, these are the basics. If time will allow, I will also try to:

1. Dockerize my service and environment
2. Push it onto the Cloud – I have no idea which one yet, should be fun
3. Create an Angular 2 web client – I know Angular 1.x and some Typescript, shouldn’t be hard
4. ???
5. Profit! – Yes, here is the point in time when I will be rich thanks to this project!

As you see, The Plan is simple, create an app and become rich in the end. It can’t fail.

If you haven’t decided yet to start, do it, what you have to loose? If you are a developer, you have to learn all the time anyway, you have to experiment, create some stuff in free time, you have to develop software. So if you are doing it already, why not join the competition and write about, it’s really not hard. If I can do it, and I am not good with writing, trust me, I am not, you can do it too!

Head to dajsiepoznac.pl and register your project. You can start your blog anywhere, even on free wordpress.com or blogger.com It doesn’t matter where, just start. If you won’t like it, you can just stop anytime you want.

---

Also published on Medium.