First, the hackathon was a blast in my opinion and can only get better.
Here’s a story of how it all went down. See a previous post introducing the hackathon.
The hackathon was chiefly conceived with the aim of exposing university students to industry best practices.
Setup
The venue for the hackathon as earlier stated was the boardroom of the faculty of sciences at the University of Lagos. Well arranged by the NACOSS team, from sound to projectors, sitting arrangement and power outlet structure.
Participants began arriving as early as 9 am, taking their seats and began familiarizing with their teammates. The participants had prior to arriving at the venue, been split into teams and communication took place via a dedicated Slack channel.
The rules of engagement were read out by Chuloo to the participants present. The documentation on the Africastalking API to be hacked was explained and demonstrated to the participants by The Dreamer, representing Africastalking.
Africastalking is an organization I describe as “building awesome stuff”. They offer services ranging from SMS interaction, voice services, offline payments, and USSD interaction which is personally my favorite as it brings another layer to application development. Like Android… and virtual reality.
The Beginning…
There was an introductory speech by the Head of the Computer Science department of the university, Dr Sawyer Babatunde. With over 80 eager, finger itching developers present, the hackathon began at exactly 3:00 pm.
What mostly occurred in the first hour was brainstorming by the participants and their teammates. The event progressed with much finger tapping on keyboards, buried gazes on screens and a sudden trip of an electrical cable lol.
Most of the participants started off with vague ideas of what to build. Some with even confusing development stack which emerged mostly because of the diverse skill set of the various team members. However, all teams were able to scale through these hurdles and proceeded to work on varying solid products.
Members of the forLoop community Olususi Kayode Oluyemi Kelvin Umechukwu were on hand to assist participants with documentation and substitute internet amongst others.
Refreshments were served and the first day of the hackathon drew to a close at 7:00 pm with participants heading to other locations to continue hacking away.
Day 2…
We all re-convened at the venue the following day at about 8:00 am. The hackathon continued on the second day at around 9:00 am.
Most of the teams finished development by midday and got ready to deploy.
Each project is to be deployed to a cloud server on Whogohost. Whogohost is an indigenous domain registrar and domain provider. Adewale Adeleye representing Whogohost was on hand to run the teams through on deploying their applications to the Cloud.
A session was held next in which each team leader came forward to explain what their team was building, much to the awe of the stage-frightened team leaders. Here’s a list of each team and what they worked on.
- Team 1 —Offline translator using USSD.
- Team 5 — Offline database for a hospital management system.
- Team 6 — Offline forex and cryptocurrency converter using USSD.
- Team 9 — Offline emergency response and information propagation system using USSD
- Team 10 — A USSD application granting access to a large number of online resources.
- Team 12 — A USSD application for learning various subjects offline.
- Team 13 — An e-commerce platform with an offline payment service.
- Team 18 — An efficient contact management platform.
- Erupt — A offline e-commerce platform using USSD.
- Apex — An interest and event platform which can be accessed offline.
- Granular Forloop — A efficient customer management platform.
- SoftConnect — A central data management platform for the University of Lagos.
- Code Warriors — Utilizing open source software to validate vehicles as either genuine or stolen before purchase.
- Alphex — Centralized voting platform.
All applications built utilized the Africastalking API either through the voice service, SMS or USSD service.
The teams submitted their projects and everyone got the opportunity to leave their feedback suggestions and ask questions, after speeches from members of the community mostly stressing on the importance of community building, knowledge sharing and collaboration, the event came to a close.
Judging…
The submissions were judged by a team comprising of seasoned developers from the forloop community as well as a staff of Africastalking. The criteria for judging were:
- The application must be deployed and be web accessible.
- The application must use an API from Africastalking
- The application must have a real-world use case
- The application features.
After the round of judging the submissions, the winners emerged with the positions of:
- 1st Place: SoftConnect
- 2nd Place: Alphex
- 3rd Place: Team 13
The individual teams have been rewarded with the prize stated earlier.
In all, it was a wonderful experience for the organizers and the participants as well. Participants got to work with individuals of seemingly different development background and it was a pain at first but became fun in the end.
The Real Ones…
I wouldn’t be done with this without acknowledging the help of everyone who jointly hosted this event, I call them the team! Thanks to Olususi Kayode Oluyemi Ipaye Alameen Itunu Ogundeji, Kelvin Umechukwu The Dreamer Ada Ogbodo, Olaolu Olawuyi the NACOSS team and all the participants of the hackathon, ya’ll the best!
Thanks to the sponsors Africastalking and Whogohost. Awesome services you got there!
We all look forward to hacking away and having fun again, please leave your suggestions and questions in the responses… also, leave some claps… to go round for everyone too lol.
Cheers.
