Hackathon

I had my first Hackathon (organised by Programming Society at uni.) and our team won 2nd place. Back then I am still pursuing my Diploma degree in UTS so I'm still on UTS college but this doesn't stop me to research about societies and clubs in UTS. I am particulary interested with Programming Society that time but I know I need to pay more than $5 to join the society because I am not a uni student (yet.). I happen to know a woman that have a high position in the society and asked her about it when I found out there is Hackathon on their facebook. In summary, I can join the Hackathon and I pay for uni students member fee (which is great, saved $25).

 

Honestly, back then I don't even know what is Hackathon clearly. I thought it was for tech people competing to see who developed the best product (it was far more than this). Based from Wikipedia, a Hackathon is a design sprint-like event; often, in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on software projects.

Getting started

There was a meeting the night before the Hackathon starts for you to choose your team members, if I remember it correctly there are four role tags (Engineer, Developer, Creative Intelligence (?), Designer) to help us in choosing our team members. I got a "Developer" tag that time and I end up finding a great group (They were all so nice.)

Problem

The Hackathon starts the next morning, with one of the judges presenting the problems we need to address. We decide to solve problem regarding to the inefficiency of communication between city planners, organisations and their relevant councils.

 

We realised that when inquiring our client, there are three focus points:

• Spam where emails get lost
• Misdirection when the relevant people aredifficult to get a hold of for new city planners
• Lack of accountability due to lack of documentation and enforcement.

Solution

We present the NSWGov Central Comms, a centralised communication hub that is specifically for city planning, connecting city planners, organisations and government. It contains a database of relevant e-mails to contact, along with due dates of when to reply. Our vision is that this will speed up the development/process and allow inter-connected designs between city planners and their stakeholders.

 

Others in the market like Jira create collaborative task management. But the value we bring is we tailored this website for city planning. Convenience ease of access to e-mails with concrete messaging, efficiency by categorising messages by types: approval, request, information, and a focus on accountability with read receipts and digital reports.

Future Plans

Our next steps are improving the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX), group threads and extending from Greater Sydney to NSW and all of Australia. We know it is ambitious, but what we're looking for is the approval of the Premier Cabinet to implement this, permitting local councils and other goverment organisations to be involved. In improving the flow of communication for city planners, it will allow more effective urban designs for us living in Sydney.

Experience

The technology used to build this web app are JavaScript, Electron, ExpressJS and SQLite as the base.

 

I have no experience on all the technology, besides learning SQL at uni so I feel so useless this time but I pushed myself to learn JavaScript as fast as I could and helped the team with the database. We pull all-nighters and slept for only 3 hours. After we finished, I directly know that I needed to learn JavaScript and do some research about it.

 

We end up winning second place! the judges said that it was not the most innovative solution but it was what they needed to address the problem. I was really happy about it although I really wish I could have contributed more. It is still one of the best experience I got.