Hack:Brunel
I attended my first hackathon, which was held at Brunel University in Uxbridge, London. With Hack:Brunel being my first hackathon, I wasn't quite sure what to expect; was I to do good, or not? I went there with other students from my university, whom were also members of the Solent Computing Society. We all arrived very early in the morning outside our university, ready and eager to have fun and get work done. Once we all met up together, we then travelled to Uxbridge, not without a quick stop off at the motorway services to get some food. Upon arrival to Brunel University, we were raring to go and get to work; however, we arrived a bit to early, so we had to wait for the other participants to arrive, but this worked out in our benefit, as we were able to split into smaller teams and brainstorm ideas for us to make for the event.
Once the event started, my team reviewed all of our existing ideas and decided to go along with the idea which fixes the problems for us at our society, as typically there are struggles when thinking of new and interesting things to do. So we set out to create a responsive web based application which finds an activity for you to do based upon specified search criteria. When creating the application, we originally thought that we could use Google maps to gather information of places nearby, however we soon discovered that this would be a paid service per API request, so we decided to create a localized dataset of places - instead of relying on third parties.
For the project I was tasked with the creation of the application, which for me included creating a responsive front-end interface; this undertook many iterations, however with suggestions from our team we came to the final design, and I built and laid out the elements and created a responsive design language for the application. Next came the inclusion of JavaScript to make the page interactive, with this I had a realisation, with the JavaScript actions operating with the application there was only instantaneous updates/refreshed to the display, so I had the idea to create and implement transitions between each page of the application, this allows the application to move and dynamically resize to fit to content in a seamless yet beautiful way, this resulted in the application looking much more user friendly and intuitive as an added benefit was that with the movement between transitions actually helped show that back-end operations were occurring, which would further help the user understand what was happening when the application was running.
With the completed version of the application, it was time to present, so me and a fellow teammate went up on stage to promote our application "Wheel" was the name we gave to it, and I came up with our team tag line of "we are reinventing the wheel". For the presentation it was originally meant to be a 50/50 split in talk time between both of us on stage, but due to the amount of content that we crammed into our presentation it was only my team mate that was able to talk. Once all of the teams had presented it was time for judging... To our joyful responses, we was told that we came in second place; and we each won a prize. Overall, I'd say my first hackathon experience went very well, and I am looking forward to more. To celebrate we even used our application to find a nearby pub, where some of the others got a drink in celebration. However, I was rather tired after the event, so after we left and got back, I went to sleep, as a big part of hackathons which I learnt was the lack of sleep which accumulates with them.
However, overall I had a very fun time, and I am looking forward to more events like this in the future!