Brisbane Hackathon 2017

The third annual Tanda Hackathon in Brisbane was on last weekend. 20 teams competed and presented in what was our biggest Brisbane Hackathon ever.

River City Labs were kind enough to host the Hackathon again this year. I must say that their new location on Brunswick St is really quite nice. It’s quite a spacious venue and it feels very new and exciting. I highly recommend that you check it out the next time they host an event of interest to you.

The theme of the Hackathon this year was our new webhooks platform. Webhooks complement the traditional way of interfacing with our product quite nicely. Instead of making a request each time you want some information, webhooks allow you to specify what you want once and then have it get sent to you whenever it becomes available. It lends itself very nicely towards event-based functionality. For example, you could create a webhook that fires whenever an employee clocks in to work, or whenever a manager approves or denies a leave request.

The value of webhooks is in their ability to automate workflows. Integration services such as Zapier mean that you often don’t even need to write any code. One team did exactly that by leveraging webhooks to send managers an email whenever an employee entered times they were not able to work into Tanda.

The winners of the Dave Allie Award for Engineering, Team Walk In Walk Out, conceptualised a new way of clocking in and out of work based on facial recognition sans any user interaction.

A fellow Tanda developer and I also worked on a new way of clocking in. The usual way of clocking in begins with the employee typing their 4 digit passcode. We thought it would be cool if you could clock in by tapping an NFC card instead, so that’s what we built. Some found it amusing when I tapped the reader with my student ID card and “Good evening, Alex Ghiculescu” appeared on the screen.

As someone who works at Tanda, I was genuinely impressed by how much terminology and product understanding the participants were able to glean in less than 24 hours.

I’m very much looking forward to Hackathon 2018.