School of Code at #OpenBankHack17
At the time of writing, it is almost 4AM on the second night of the Railsbank Open Bank Hack 17. Following a slightly disastrous evening wherein we discovered that our backend was completely incompatible with the provided API, we are now starting to approach a product we can say we’re happy with.
The aim of the weekend was to create a working product using Railsbank’s comprehensive API. A number of challenges were on offer for the contestants, ranging from voice activated banking to various compliance-related tasks. We decided to go for something nice and easy: Make a multi-user business banking frontend for small to medium-sized businesses.
The SoC team at #OpenBankHack17 was represented by me (Ben Rosell), Chris Miller, Pete Yu, and Ashleigh “Mad Doc” Danks. We started the weekend by getting to know our fellow competitors and soon gained a fifth team member; introducing Jonathan, the first honorary member of the School of Code.
After hearing the orientation talk and plundering the snack bar for Jaffa Cakes(tm), we stole away into the very cutely named* “Walkman” meeting room to plan our project. Walkman became our base of operations for the weekend, and we happily shared it with the team from Hertfordshire university.
Taking our lessons in Agile to heart, the entire first night was spent strategising. Our plans took up five of the room’s six whiteboards, and only because the other team had staked their claim on the sixth. Once our views were laid out and Chris and Jonathan had come to a consensus on what a ledger is, we were finally ready to begin coding… which is when I decided to go to bed. I figured that the plan wasn’t going anywhere, and maybe a magical coding fairy would come along and get our backend up and running overnight.
Well, there was no fairy, but Chris can knock out a remarkable amount of code when plied with enough coffee, and by the dawn of day two, Pete and I were ready to set up our frontend.
At about 9AM, Celine from the Hertfordshire team arrived, but it was almost an hour until another of her team mates turned up. For one reason or another, her team were unable to attend the rest of the competition, and even the one who did make it had to leave soon after — And so School of Code acquired it’s sixth team member and second honorary SoC bootcamper.
Progress continued fairly consistently throughout day two. Celine had never worked with Javascript before and was unfamiliar with Agile and Scrum, so we took some time to explain our routines and, in lieu of a ball to throw around, bundled up a pair of free socks from the event. Every so often, somebody would pop their head through the door to check on our progress and ask about the bootcamp. We always took the time to explain our project, and before long, we had our pitch memorised.
At about 8PM, William, another of the contestants who entered on his own, came into Walkman and let us in on a little secret: the API had changed and everything that we had done on the backend up to that point would no longer work. Of course, we only discovered this after all of the Railsbank staff had gone home, leaving us with nothing to do but panic. It took Chris another four hours to get a workaround together, and I suspect that it only worked because the computer had started feeling sorry for us.
Having all but abandoned his own project, William became the de facto seventh member of team SoC, helping us out massively with the styling of our React components.
It is now just gone 5AM, which tells you how long it takes me to write anything. At this point, it’s hard to say what our app will end up looking like. Regardless, I think we can all say that we’re proud of what we’ve achieved. We’ve made some friends, we’ve had some laughs, and we’ve learned a lot. Oh, and I won a bottle of champagne in a raffle. Maybe it’s a good omen.
*There were four meeting rooms, all of which were named after an obsolete piece of tech (Walkman, Floppy Disc, Cassette, and Pager) with a matching item tied to the light switch.
