hackathon firsts but not lasts
First hackathon down!
What a crazy cool experience. It will not be my last one.
The Iron Yard Hackathon ran from Friday night through Sunday night.
Hackathon basics:
- split up into teams
- see project problem statements
- pick a project and GO!
- code
- eat
- sleep
- repeat
- present and demo your solution at end of 48 hours
Sounds so simple. It is easily one of the most difficult and rewarding activities I’ve done with my computer for a long time.
Our task: Build an app (mobile + web app) that would support employees using iBeacons and their iPhones.
Outcomes: I had to miss the kick off meeting Friday night but my teammates (Dan, Jonny, Cori, and Mac) did a great job of understanding the problem statement and coming up with a great plan.
On Saturday, we set to work and back end spent a good portion of the day working on the Sign Up and Login API methods. Dan and I were faced with some some coding roadblocks going into lunch. It was almost uncanny that we both came to the exact same “lunch time epiphany” which allowed us to solve a roadbloack! With that roadblock resolved, we were able to knock out the reamaining API methods by Saturday evening.
By Sunday, Front End and Mobile teams were hard at work on their UIs while Dan and I worked on fixing up the documentation (so proud), writing Unit Tests, and tweaking the API as needed by the team. Dan was a great back end partner! He was able to quickly push out documentation for his code and he put together the most fantastic presentation I have ever seen. Let me introduce our amazing employee productivity application:
Office Hawk!
I was so proud to work on my team and demo what we created. Our mobile app and UIs were sleek, wonderful things. Every person contributed something great. We truly focused on the purpose of the exercise: working as a team. I felt like we succeeded and it made me want to build more things. Soooo when’s the next one?!??
a few random Marta thoughts from the ride home:
- Things I can make pale in comparison to what WE can make together
- Life greatest adventure is the unknown