At the inaugural hackGCT 2015 (and my first hackathon!), I teamed up with Olivia Ross, Nico Cobb, and John Ward to create Data Farm. It’s an iOS application that tracks your cellular data usage and motivates people to consider cheaper cellular data plans by exchanging their unused data bytes for “bites” which are used to raise animals on a virtual farm.

It’s a fantastic concept, we know.

I was responsible for building the cellular data tracking mechanism. After much trial and error (and some clever Googling), I figured out that it was possible to partially determine data usage simply by accessing certain functions in the ifaddrs iOS library.

Unfortunately, ifaddrs only allows retreival of microcosms of information at a time (it only shows data usage up to the last four gigabytes since the last launch), so I implemented a system to continually sniff the framework for more accurate heuristics.

After 6 hours of non-stop development (and a brief hiccup with XCode projects failing to work nicely across multiple computers), we qualified for the finals and eventually were crowned the “Beginner Group Winner” of hackGCT 2015!

Olivia also made a presentation deck for our demo, which you can find here.

You can view the source code for the entire project here.