Bronze Partner Aepona’s Belfast Team Takes Part in 24 Global hackathon!
Read about “Team Every-Thing” and get some tips on pointers for #HackTheHub!
Semicolons 2018: Team Every-Thing
Semicolons is Aepona’s parent company Persistent Systems’s 24-hour annual, global hackathon, where self-managed teams ideate and compete to build innovative solutions and showcase the latest technology trends. Persistent uses hackathons extensively in its digital transformation projects to help its customers rapidly innovate and explore the art of the possible. And Semicolons is an eagerly anticipated internal hackathon that allows Persistent to do it for fun and keep skills sharp!
24 Hour Recap
The Aepona team began Semicolons 2018 by discussing solutions which were both innovative and possible to achieve within the timeframe, yet with scope for future expansion. With the whole team sitting around a table, ideas were bouncing back and forth until eventually, the team settled on the creation of a platform to measure and store pollution data, which could then be displayed through a user interface. The workload was then split between the team members.
Through the first half of the 24-hour period, the back-end was set up to allow the data to be collected and transformed into something which could then be output to the user. The team settled on using a Fitbit-like activity tracker as the user interface to represent the pollution that a user was being exposed to throughout their day. The second half was spent connecting the front and back-end prototypes together, and then fine-tuning.
During the wrap-up, they discussed presentation strategy and what information they wanted to highlight. The team put some slides together and arranged who would be presenting and how — the judging was taking place at 4.30am GMT so it was tough to keep the energy up!
Output
The solution consisted of a Fitbit-like dashboard as mentioned above, which keeps track of the levels of pollution that the user is being exposed to throughout their day, and sends an alert if it is reaching dangerous levels. The levels deemed as dangerous were taken from the World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics, which can be seen in the table.
Users can connect their own personal device to track pollution or simply use sensors which would be placed around the city. This provides value to those without personal devices, yet provides a more personal approach for those who would like to connect their own smartphone or smartwatch.
Aepona’s solution highlights awareness of pollution-related health issues while also providing a ‘pollution map’ of the city, which would benefit other parties, such as government advisors or public transport businesses. The solution could also be easily extended by these parties — for example discounts for public transport could be offered when pollution is higher, or pollution information could be displayed in real-time on road signs. The design was created with this in mind, making extensibility the main priority.
The team contained members who are new to Persistent and for whom Semicolons 2018 was their first Hackathon experience. This provided a valuable insight into both the culture within Persistent and the skills necessary to succeed in a team-based coding project. The experience was a first for the Belfast office — and it was one the team looks forward to taking part in again!
Thanks to Richard Murphy and Alastair Spence for the write up!
