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Three geek projects for Geek Pride Day

Hi geeks! Congratulations! Star Wars lovers wish to keep new hopes, hitchhikers across the galaxy are advised not to leave home without a towel, and flat-panel proponents are advised to pick a lilac twig today. Live long and prosper. And under the cut you will be waiting for stories about geeks that we found in Dodo.




Geek Day at the Dodo


Now about 18,000 people work in Dodo Pizza. We thought that since we have pizza geeks among us, then there should be techno geeks. We thought and decided to find them: those who come up with and implement projects that optimize / automate processes, who seek to improve the world around them. Among all the projects that were shared with us, with the help of our CTOs, Sasha Andronov, CMO Vani Tikhov and CPO Seryoga Gryazev, we selected three finalists and want to tell you about them.

If lazy to read
- you can see.




3rd place. Project "HS Player"


Hello! My name is Vlad Singer, I am 26 years old, I am a bachelor of computer science, I work as an engineer in the management company TA QA. My project is called HS Player .

If lazy to read
- you can see.



HS player is a mobile application for listening to music that my friend Dima and I have been developing since 2013. Initially, the player was created to read .flac and .cue files, which do not support the standard iOS application.

Over time, support for cloud services appeared, which greatly increased the attractiveness of the player. Today, the player has the following indicators: 8K + active users per month (MAU), high crash-free ≥99.9%, optimized code that consumes little hardware resources and has a small size, advanced equalizer (by the standards of mobile devices), no bullet (i.e. advertising or meticulous overloaded analytics for users). However, the most important indicator is satisfied users who write thanks to us and highly appreciate the application in the App Store.

What prompted the creation of the project


It all started like this: one day on a March morning, back in 2016, my friend asked me to take a look at his pet project to evaluate the application, since I had a diverse experience with music applications before. In the process of getting to know the player, I expressed my vision, proposed to improve. And now we have been working on this project for more than 4 years.

The player Dima created for himself so that he had the opportunity to listen to music in .flac and .cue format on iOS devices with the possibility of detailed equalization control to eliminate the shortcomings of the frequency response headphones. Of course, the standard iOS player does not provide such opportunities, even 6 years after the first release of HS Player in the AppStore.

How it works


The guts of our project look like this:

  1. Audio part:
    • CoreAudio — PCM , EQ.
    • AudioFileStreaming/URLSession/GCD — .
    • FLACLib — PCM-, PCM CoreAudio.
    • preamp.
    • TPCircularBuffer — .
  2. :
    • AVFoundation — Apple-.
    • FLACLib — -.
    • CoreData — (, , , ).
  3. Clouds:
    • MegaSdk — .
    • YandexLoginSDK — ..
    • GoogleSignIn/GoogleAPIClientForREST/Drive — ..
    • FilesProvider (cocoapods) — dropbox, onedrive, pdrive, box.
    • OAuthSwift (cocoapods) — OAuth.
  4. :
    • GCDWebServer(cocoapods).
  5. :
    • OperationQueue — .
    • AHDownloadButton(cocoapods) — .
  6. :
    • Firebase/Analytics.
    • Firebase/Crashlytics.
  7. :
    • Swift.
    • Objective-C.
    • C.
  8. :
    • MVC/MVP.
  9. :
    • CocoaPods.

,


The technical difficulties that we encountered are the implementation of audio functions for which there are no ready-made solutions for mobile applications (for example, gapless for mp3). And our project is completely free, we pay all expenses out of pocket, so we have some difficulties with renting services and buying new development tools. However, in the near future we will release additional features with monetization.

In fact, our project team consists of 2 people, but there are also loyal users who constantly write us bug reports and feature requests. There were times when users asked us to add them to beta testers.

As for the possibility of scaling - they are large. Some of our competitors present unreasonably expensive products (just a music player for $ 700) without alternatives, so we have good chances to change this market. I am at a loss to answer whether we need the help of investors now, but the help of an experienced interface designer will not hurt us.

The most important


  1. Tell me, what bonuses / profit does your project already give or can give to the future?
    At the moment, it is difficult to imagine what practical benefits a music player in food technology can bring. It comes to mind porting the player to a TV panel in restaurants to play media content from cloud storage, but this is rather something from the realm of fantasy.
  2. What advice or words of support can you give to those who are just emerging ideas of their projects?
    • Try to immediately realize your ideas, and not wait for a better moment.
    • Work on MVP (minimum viable product) and decompose tasks.
    • Communicate more with people from other areas.
    • Talk about your project and its updates.

2nd place. Project “Temperature control of refrigerators and freezers”


Hello! My name is Yazev Semyon, I am 32 years old, I started working with Dodo from managing a pizzeria in Moscow, and now I am engaged in serving pizzerias. My project is called "Temperature Control of Refrigerators and Freezers."

What prompted the creation of the project


One morning I came to work and found that the freezer unit turned off and the food in the freezer began to melt. At that moment, I thought it would be cool to find out about such problems in some automated way, right at the time of the incident, and not after the fact in the pizzeria.


  1. .
    • ESP8266&NodeRED&Grafana.
    • : 30 .
  2. .
    • AR230&Elfin-EE11&yaenergetik.ru&NodeRED&Grafana.
    • : 20+ . .

I want to divide the information about the technical guts of the projects into two parts: hardware and software.

Iron part: esp8266 is used as the iron part, ds18b20 and Tasmota firmware as the controller with the temperature sensor.
Software part: the controller sends temperature data via the MQTT protocol to the Eclipse Mosquitto broker. From there, using NodeRED, the data is transferred to the InfluxDB database.



Next, the data is visualized in Grafana.



And notifications of problems with temperature are sent to chat in Telegram.



During the existence of the project, I changed the firmware several times, how to visualize and store data, and also how to notify. In principle, there were no difficulties; everything turned out evolutionarily.

The most important


  1. Tell me, what bonuses / profit does your project already give or can give to the future?
    Thanks to my project, discipline and control of refrigeration equipment have improved. In the future, it will be possible to organize temperature control not only in refrigerators, but also in restaurants
  2. What advice or words of support can you give to those who are just emerging ideas of their projects?
    Do not be afraid to come up with and implement your ideas.

1st place. Project “Problem Monitoring”


Hello! My name is Marat Migranov, I’m 32 years old, I live in St. Petersburg and work as an Operations Director in the SPb-1 network. I want to talk about my project “Monitoring Problems”.

If lazy to read
- you can see.



What prompted the creation of the project


At the time of the creation of my project, there were already 4 pizzerias in our franchised network (the Dodo edition is a franchised pizzeria network. Each of our partners has a different number of pizzerias in their network, in this case 4. There were 611 pizzerias in the entire Dodo network at the time of publication ) . We received complaints from customers, but there was no centralized analytics system for the entire network. We were faced with an urgent need - to collect and organize feedback from customers in order to see systemic problems in pizzerias and work on their solution.

The task had to be solved, and the main difficulty for me was that I had never worked with Google Data Studio before, I had to deal with it from scratch.

How it works


Now in production, the third version of Problem Monitoring is already running. The whole project is based on a very simple mechanism. Data from complaints and reviews in the Dodo Pizza app is entered in the Google Table. In Google Data Studio, I developed a form that collects this data from a table, combines problems and pizzerias, considers the percentage of problems of each pizzeria and the network as a whole, allows you to generate statistics for the period, gives information about the dynamics. Every morning an e-mail with the results arrives in the mail, I also use this data in the daily, weekly and monthly mailing for managers.

As I said above, I understood Google Data Studio from scratch. As I mastered the functions of the platform, I finished my decision.

  1. , Data Studio, . , MVP, .


    1.0.
  2. . ( , , , ).


    2.0.
  3. , .


    3.0.

Now the management company has developed and implemented its analytics tool “Problem Statistics”. In my opinion, it solves many issues, but it lacks analysis of data from the application and daily analytics, so I do not plan to abandon my monitoring. Scaling to the whole network (and not only) is also possible for my solution. If there are people who want to introduce it at home, I’m ready to help. This project does not require financial costs.

The most important


  1. Tell me, what bonuses / profit does your project already give or can give to the future?
    The main bonus is the improvement of customer experience by reducing the problematic of pizzerias, which in turn leads to increased customer loyalty and revenue growth, as well as to a reduction in the discount on return.
  2. What advice or words of support can you give to those who are just emerging ideas of their projects?
    The main thing - do not put off the shelf. We must take and do.


We hope that all the geeks of the world find a place in the sun! Do not forget that all your undertakings will sooner or later fulfill their destiny and continue to weird.

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