Yesterday I experienced my first hackathon, HackItTogether. It was a 14-hour all-women coding extravaganza, and I was lucky enough to be on a team with four other Flatiron School ladies - Indy, Paula, Robin, and Wendy. We all have different levels of coding experience, but the Flatiron curriculum united us with a full stack background. We formed our team after I posted about the hackathon in the Flatiron Slack and then we devised a sample web app idea - a tool to find or post donation goods for kids. We ended up not using that idea at all but it was a good precursor of the app we came up with on the big day. We were all on board with creating something that could ultimately help people, and our project won!
THE IDEA
HackItTogether started at 8:30am and I met my teammates in person for the first time. After the sponsors announced the challenges, the hacking began. JetBlue challenged us to build an app prototype that demonstrates how JetBlue is the most caring airline in the world. We wanted our project to use tech for good, so we came up with the idea of All You Can Give Back - a web app offering volunteering opportunities to JetBlue customers. Users could book their travel to volunteering projects through JetBlue and earn incentives such as extra bonus miles.
THE TECH
On the back end we used Ruby on Rails and used Nokogiri to scrape volunteer project information from International VolunteerHQ. We implemented Bootstrap for a quick and easy front end design. I worked on the architecture of the app by creating the models and some seed data. I also implemented Bootstrap in the layout and worked on the landing page.
THE CHALLENGES
- Collaboration - Using github to collaborate is a wonderful thing, but since we are all used to coding individually this was a challenge for us. Thankfully we did figure out how to merge all of our work, with the help of the Atlassian resource. We also learned how to delegate the parts of the project so we could all contribute and be efficient with our time.
- Scraping - We originally tried finding an API for volunteering opportunities to no avail. Scraping is a scrappy way of getting the job done, and we had trouble pulling all of the objects in but ended up getting it to work enough for our demo.
- Technical Difficulties - We were called up to present our project as the first of 22 submissions, and we had technical difficulties hooking up to the projector. We ended up having to present to just the judges. On top of that, Robin’s mousepad quit working and we needed an emergency mouse loan from a fellow competitor.
THE REWARDS
- Inspiration - Being in a room full of female coders was empowering! The keynote speaker, Katy Kasmai (a Senior Engineering Program Manager at Google NYC), spoke about building moonshots to solve our greatest challenges. She reminded us that we should make our big ideas happen and not leave them up to someone else. I was blown away by all of the creative ideas that each team presented, and I felt proud to be a part of it.
- Experience - Now I know what to expect from a hackathon, and I love it! It was an emotional rollercoaster of excitement and jittery nerves and I loved every second of it. I loved working under pressure and collaborating to bring an idea to fruition. None of us could have built it in one day on our own so it was cool to realize what we were able to do by joining forces.
- Winning - Our project won the JetBlue challenge and we were shocked! There were so many amazing submissions so we did not expect to win. I was proud of what we built and thought the hackathon was a success overall, but winning was icing on the cake. We each won two round trip flight tickets! Not bad for a group of 1st time hackathoners.
THE TRICKS
- Adapt - You don’t know what kind of challenges will arise during a hackathon. You have to be flexible and adapt to any situation whether it be a broken laptop or a pesky bug. See the bigger picture and move forward.
- Listen - Everyone will bring different ideas to the table and it’s to your benefit to stay open-minded and listen to everyone’s points. It may just be a winning idea, and you’re all in it together.
- Learn - This is almost impossible to not do, but ideally you will walk away from each hackathon with some new knowledge. Reflect on that!
- Have fun - Yes a hackathon can be stressful at times, especially the last couple of hours. But make sure to take a step back and enjoy the journey!
View our Github repo here.
Learn more about our winning project and view demo photos here.
Here were are with the JetBlue judges after they announced that we won!
