Hack The South
My third hackathon was hosted at the nearby University of Southampton, it was there only after a short cycle journey I had arrived, and was anticipating the arrivals of my teammates. At this hackathon we split of into smaller teams, and started brainstorming ideas of what it was that we could create within the 24 hour time frame; we came up with a few ideas, but the one, that we really took hold to was a property fault management system, that used blockchain technologies to log tenant requests (tickets), which were then automatically filtered by what the landlord had specified that they would be willing to accommodate to - for an abundance of reasons - and if any tradesmen met the criteria would then be assigned to the tenant's ticket request.
This idea seemed really good for us, as it seemed to be an idea that had not been replicated elsewhere. We started off making the application, this included servers, databases, as well as a client based application. The server and databases were handled in unison, and the MongoDB database was access by the Mongoose API from the Node.js server, this allowed us to query the data from the database collections, and allowed us to further mimic and fine-tune what the data to be sent to the client would be, in this case the server filtered out the distance that a tradesman would be willing to commute, based among query parameters of the longitude or latitude of the property address. This allowed us to further customize how we - as a team - would encompass the types of data that would be shown. The client interface was originally written within the Angular framework, but we decided to move to the Ionic framework, to improve the consistency of the interface; and was used to relay the data that was generated by the Node.js server. We then set of to select a name for the application, which was decided to be called "DROID". With this we had a working prototype, and we went off to present our application to the other teams that were at the event.
Our presentation went fairly well, although we was cut off due to the time limitations, of which we exceeded due to the amount of information that we tried to cram into the presentation; which was not ideal, although we was able to show off a demo of our application, which we were however pleased about. After the remaining teams presented it was time for judging, and once the judges returned back with their selection of winners, we all collectively waited in anticipation, each eager to hear the results. Needless to say we were disappointed with the outcome, as we did not win; but we were happy with what we had made in the process, and shall take this experience along with us into future projects.