Getting out of my own way and into my first hackathon
via Giphy
For anybody that knows me, they would know how difficult it is for me to be social in large crowds, and by large I mean more than 5. But I’ve been really pushing myself lately to improve my networking skills, like attending more tech-focused Meetups.
Last weekend I participated in my first hackathon. The event took place at OviaHealth in downtown Boston, and it was the first time they were holding the Technology Supporting Women Hackathon. The event’s focus was around women’s health. The participants included developers, designers, clinicians, and others.
Friday night was the kickoff where introductions were made, rules and ideas were discussed, and teams were brought together.
My group included a QA Engineer, UI Designer, two computer science students, and myself as developer. Our group came up with the idea of a social networking-type site for Moms to journal about raising kids. We started with whiteboarding ideas with our UI Designer taking the lead and hashing out the problem that we want our product to solve.
Photos of whiteboarding results
The next day on Saturday, we were back together around 9 in the morning, and had until 5 pm to work and prepare a presentation.
We got off to a rough start, the hackathon experience was new to all of us, but one. We had to decide what framework we wanted to code in. Should we use Phoenix? Angular? Javascript?
Our product was going to have a lot of functionality. I am new to web development, I’m starting to learn Angular (see previous post) but I wasn’t confident that I would be able build the many functionalities with it in the short timeframe. We finally decided on Javascript on the front-end and Ruby on Rails for a back-end.
As we started coding kind of late, it seemed unlikely that we would have a workable product for the 3-minute presentation. So our UI Designer, simultaneously worked on a prototype version using InVision that would have clickable hotspots, and that is what was presented.
Screenshots of prototype version of the Calm Mom application
At the end of it all, I was really happy with having the experience to work with people from different backgrounds whom I had never met before Friday night. If I could do it again, with the knowledge of what I learned from this first experience, I probably would try to code it in Angular, because I think the framework would be better for multi-pages. Also, to push myself in new and somewhat uncomfortable ways to become a better developer.