Hackathon Time!
At ida mediafoundry, we have many different profiles who love building, learning and growing every single day. In order to help our team in their efforts to build their development expertise, we frequently organise events like hackathons, brainstorm and tech sessions at The Hubb, and we urge all members of the team to visit interesting conferences and learn from each other through pair programming.
As a consultancy firm in on- and offline web-enabled communication, these events help us to keep that group spirit alive, even when we’re all working on different projects at different customers. Hackathons are especially helpful to create a bridge between our design, analysis, development, and marketing experts, because it encourages everyone to learn more about the other fields and create a better understanding of what another person is working on and the struggles unique to that particular field.
Our hackatons and events also allow our multi-passionate team to dive into the newest technologies and tools, enabling them to work on VR and AR apps, for example.
During our last hackathon, at the end of April, we spent three days learning all about e-commerce and how to build an application on top of a headless e-commerce framework.
Let the hacking begin!
Our hackathon started with a brainstorming session where a few people pitched their idea to the team. We ended up with 2 different prototype ideas, so we decided to divide our group of 13 into 2 groups, each of the groups working on one of the prototypes. The first group took responsibility to build a product that included an image search and image recognition software, and the other team was responsible for building a product by combining a commerce API and a chatbot.
On Friday night, we had to define a project approach. This provided some difficulties but we kept going until 2.30am and eventually made some progress thanks to our go-to agile proces.
Ready, set, go!
On Saturday, we started the day with a good and firm breakfast. To help our developers create some more sense of what they needed to develop, our digital creatives created wireframes to help define the front-end functionalities. Our digital creatives go beyond wireframing though, they also brainstormed about the necessary css changes with our front-end developers to make sure their code would reflect the design needed.
While aligning the wireframes and front-end requirements with some team members, the rest of the development team started building their applications in React, Java or NodeJS.
One team decided to host their application on an S3 bucket. They used a Java REST service for the back-end (deployed on beanstalk) to handle product randomisation and authentication towards a third-party product API.
The second team also had a React application hosted on an S3 bucket and combined it with an AWS lambda in NodeJS and the AWS Rekognition service in order to retrieve product information from an image. The product API itself was built on a NodeJS service that could also be deployed on beanstalk.
By Saturday night, our MVP’s got some shape, features were working, and plans for additional finetuning were made.
In other words, both teams were able to call it a day, feeling pretty okay with what they were able to build in such a short time.
Pitch Day!
On Sunday, bright and early, the team was back for a nice breakfast and some finishing touches before presenting their MVP — the final result of a weekend of hard work…
The price is right
The first team developed an application called “The price is right”. This application lets you guess the price of a random product that is displayed.
If you guess wrong and do not fall within acceptable distance from the actual price, based on certain parameters, a message is displayed to let you know that you did not guess correctly and it will show the actual price (allowing you to learn from your mistake). When this pop-up window closes, you will have the option to try again with a new product and another chance to guess the price.
If you guessed correctly, a chat window appears in the bottom right corner. In this window you can interact with a chatbot that will greet you and congratulate you on guessing correctly. During the conversation the chatbot will offer to add the product to your basket with a 10% discount.
Bertify
The second application is called Bertify. Based on a picture taken of you, the application detects your gender and the color of your clothes. Using this information, the application will list a number of products on the next page, ranked by clothing type, filtered by gender, and matching the style you are wearing in the image.
Clicking on of the products would add the image of the product under the image you took from yourself, allowing you to see how this new piece of clothing would look on you. Your face is extracted from the full image, also using Rekognition, to make sure you only see your face above the clothing images. Both a top piece and bottom piece can be selected, of course, so you can see the possible combinations.
After the teams pitched their products to the jury, they held a short deliberation of who would become the winner of this hackaton. Both teams were quite nervous to see who won…
AND THE WINNER IS…
“The Price is Right”!
We had a blast of a weekend, with good food, good company and good coding.
We can’t wait for the next one!
