Hi everyone. This will be my first post here but I have been reading some of the messges whenever I had the chance.
I am very honored to have been selected the winner for “Best Use of Firebase” category.
I got to know about this competiton on the 6th of June, from a mutual friend. This was already almost getting to a month after the competition started. After finding out about the competition, I spent about 2 weeks trying to decide what to work on. I often felt overwhelmed.
The three ideas I wanted to work on was:
A device that performs live translation when plugged into a smart TV, whereby any program the user watches, they hear the audio in their language. So this was going to auto translate the audio and replay it to the user. This would have required the usage of probably the Gemma models which was not allowed for the competition. So I had to drop this idea.
My second idea was to work on education, but I didn’t go with it as I couldn’t think of a way to improve educational technology in a way that could stand out.
At this point, about 1.5 months had passed and I hadn’t yet started. I needed inspiration. So I wondered what Gemini could help me do personally. My father before he passed away last year often said after retiring, he would love to travel the world. I started thinking of a way to simplify Trip planning. I wanted my solution to be so simple that anyone could use it, and I also wanted it to be a one stop shop for anything Travel.
By the time I started coding, 2 months had gone by. I had my normal day job and so I could only work at night. I program extensively in OCaml and so I had to learn on the way, how to write Flutter apps and use other Google technologies.
At this point, I want to take this time to appreciate the Firebase team for an awesome product. As a first time user of Firebase, I was very impressed at how easy it is to setup Firebase. This meant I didn’t have to worry much about infrastructure and technology and my focus was on how to build a great product. I believe this is the aim of Firebase and I am happy to testify that this has been my exact experience working with it.
Trippy can plan an enitre trip for you from just a short audio recording or sentence. Here is a great article written by @Lloyd_Hightower on the Firebase Blog about how Trippy uses Firebase.
https://firebase.blog/posts/2024/11/gemini-competition-best-firebase-app
I intensively worked on Trippy during the last two weeks of the competition right up to the final day. On the night before the deadline, I had not done my video yet. This was a very overwhelming process. If you watch the video, my eyes are red because I had not slept the previous night, trying to make the project as best as I can. I thought of a video concept to do and wrote a script but after recording with my phone, I couldn’t go through with it. The video was very boring, even to me who made it. I was explaining a lot and trying to breakdown everything, I was quite excited about the technology part. Eventually I thought about doing a simple Mr. Beast like intro and then just showcasing the different things that can be done on the app. I eventually compiled this video and submitted my application a few hours to the deadline.
One other thing I will like to mention is that, as I was building Trippy, I utitlized some Google Maps API’s which incurred a heavy bill. This was a very frustrating moment for me and I almost gave up. I read on various blogs and saw that most people who had incurred such charges were refunded by the Google Maps team. This happened in the last week of the deadline. I paid the charges and reached out the Google Maps Team about the incident hoping they might refund me. Luckily they were very supportive and after some time, they refunded the amount. I also want to take this opportunity to thank the Google Maps team.
Eventually I worked on a project that I loved and it’s something I use myself.
At the moment, Trippy is not published online but I am working towards having it published.
They were many awesome projects in the various categories of this competition and I hope at some point these projects all make it to production.
I am very happy to have been the winner of the Firebase category, to be honesnt, never in my wildest dreams did I expect it. I just knew I was building a project I really loved and used the Firebase technology in a way that makes the project awesome.
Trippy uses Flutter as a frontend, and Google Cloud (Functions, Firebase, Maps), and various travel API’s for the backend.
My submission video is at:
https://ai.google.dev/competition/projects/trippy
Best regards,
Ndahi.
impressive app