Like most things in life, a hackathon is every bit a roller coaster ride. Just when we were about to move #hackmum to a smaller location fearing a low turnout, in came devs with their trusty laptops and their ‘dawg-lets-do-this’ look.
The brainstorming session (where ideas are put up on the board and teams are formed) was every bit as interesting as a Lok Sabha horse trading jamboree. The hackers pitched their 9 ideas with a great zeal in an attempt to attract similar minded developers (4 were made).
The technologies used were equally interesting. Augustine introduced us to Angular.js. (Check out the website and watch the video, it’s ridiculously quick). It was married to Node.js and MongoDB for his idea, ‘DummyCandidate’. The app gives a foolproof way to identify students under the age of 18 who don’t have a government issued photo-id. We’re speculating that this is one of the first hackathons in India to use this stack.
Next up was Lost&Found by Tirthesh and Raxit.
It was a location based lost and found search built upon php/codeigniter,mongodb and Bootstrap. One can report when,where and what is lost (or found) and the app will notify in the future if any relevant match is found. An Android app was built as well.
Swapnil, Darshan and Satish presented their take on a visual user license agreement in the hope that people would at least take a glance at it before signing their lives away. It looked ‘inspired’ by a certain Metro UI. Stack used here was PHP/CodeIgniter/JQuery+ZurbFoundation
The last app built for the day was was an Android based citizen activism app by Basvaraj & team that enabled citizens to report irregularities like potholes, trees being felled, garbage, etc. to the local municipal body.
What was most exciting to see was that all the teams that set out to build their apps sat through the night and finished their apps to a prototype level. It’ll be nice to see more devs come in and scratch their ‘I-really-want-to-build-that-out’ itch.
The next edition of Hackerspaces will happen on the 24th and 25th of November. If you know someone who stops listening to conversations midway because they’re probably debugging some function in their head, do invite them. Like always, pizza and unlimited chai/coffee on the house.
(We thank our gracious hosts, Infibeam. That hot chocolate was mighty comforting. )
nice info