Flockathon-1

Flock, the #1 Team Messenger invites you to experience the power of the FlockOS - the World’s First Chat Operating System - through our series of ‘Flockathons’. App developers can build incredibly powerful apps, bots, and integrations on top of the FlockOS. So, get your thinking hats on, and come up with innovative solutions to push the frontiers of team productivity.

Flock is a part of the Directi Group which also comprises Radix, Ringo, Zeta and Codechef.

Step 1: Watch the Flock intro video

Step 2: Watch the Platform intro video

Step 3: Get Flock for your team

• Download and install Flock from www.flock.co
• Create a team for you and your team mates
• Make sure you install both the Desktop and Mobile (iOS, Android) clients
• Invite your teammates to your Flock team

Step 4: Register for this Flockathon

• Join the Flockathon team to receive updates and important information. All shortlisted participants: please join the team at http://hackerearth-flockathon.flock.co/
• Register for the Flockathon at the link above

Step 5: Check out the API Docs

API Documentation Link

Step 6: Register your app

• Login to the Flock dev dashboard at https://dev.flock.co/
• Register your app (The Dev Dashboard link is whitelisted for all shortlisted participants)

Step 7: Decide what you want to build

FlockOS - the World’s first Chat Operating System - is the ultra-powerful platform on which one can build apps and integrations within Flock. Apps are a first class citizen in Flock. With FlockOS, your apps can:

• Send Messages and Attachments to Flock groups and users. For example, the GitHub app sends configurable notifications to any Flock Group. The Todo app notifies your group whenever a task is completed.
• Configure a Bot to send directed messages to users like the Reminder bot, which sends a reminder message at a scheduled time.
• Add an Attachment Picker to the Attachment Picker bar. For example, the Poll app adds a button to the Attachment bar that allows a user to create and send opinion polls in Flock
• Add a Chat Tab Button to the Chat tab bar. The Todo app adds a button to the Chat tab bar, which pops up the sidebar widget and shows the various tasks of the team
• Add Widgets to Flock desktop and mobile clients. These include the modal widget, the sidebar widget and the attachment widget. Apps such as the Poll app, Todo app and others use these widgets to provide an amazing GUI for their apps
• Setup Slash Command to receive commands from the user. For example, the /video slash command creates a video conference room and displays its URL in the group
• Setup your Launcher Button. For example, the ToDo app uses the App Launcher button to display a list of todos.
• Receive specific URLs to generate URL Previews. For example, the Google Drive app subscribes to all URLs starting with drive.google.com to provide a rich preview back.

Step 8: Setup your hosting

Depending on what you are building you may need to host your app on a server somewhere. We recommend one of the below options

• Use ngrok. Ngrok allows you to expose a web server running on your local machine to the Internet. This makes it easy to test and demo your apps from the comfort of your localhost. Also allows you to inspect and replay all traffic. Note that each time you restart ngrok your app http endpoint will change.
• AWS S3 + AWS API Gateway + Lambda + RDS
  • S3 can host your HTML and Javascript files
  • Lambda lets you host your functions on Java, Python or Node.js
  • API Gateway exposes those Lambda functions as an HTTP endpoint
  • RDS provides a MySQL data store incase you need one
• AWS EC2 + RDS
  • In case you want your own full blown VM you can use AWS EC2 and RDS
• Setup a FREE AWS developer account for any of the above two options. Link to be shared post initial shortlisting.

Step 9: Final Presentations

• Teams will be invited for final presentations post initial shortlisting
• Teams will be given 24 hours to complete the task and make their presentations
• Every team will be provided with food, beverages, and beanbags to sustain them through the Flockathon

May the Code be with you! :)