It was hosted by A Thinking Ape and Silicon Sisters.
The Hackathon was aimed at promoting female developers and the turnout was great! There was a mixer the previous evening to meet other developers going to the hackathon today and tentatively formed a team with another aspiring developer who also has amazing experience in design. She went to Emily Carr and is amazing at front end web development! Talked to a whole bunch of developers whose enthusiasm inspired me immensely.
The day of the hackathon, I teamed up with the developer I met at the mixer the previous night and an ambitious computer science friend from UBC! I was really blessed to have these two on my team. We decided to work with GWT with GAE because I was most familiar with it and we had a basic idea of what we wanted to make for our web application. We wanted to build an application where people can post up reviews of chocolates they've eaten around the world. They're able to mention things like location and price of the chocolate they want to review. Most of the time I was working with data persistence - keeping the reviews in datastore and the other two were working on front-end UI. As I was working with maps in my current cpsc 310 class, I just slapped on the code that I was working on previously to add in the feature of displaying locations of chocolates that were reviewed and posted on the web app. Unfortunately, after I got persistence working on my machine, I ran into problems pushing my changes onto github so I ended up not adding it to our final product. We had to use dummy data, and adding data was erased after you close the browser. I plan on probably fixing this and deploying it just for future reference. During the hackathon I had a lot of sugar, I'm worried for my health. More hackathons like this and I could develop diabetes O_O *knocks on wood*
At the end of the day, 18 teams presented their hacked together application and all were pretty amazing. There were web applications and games. One of the games involved two robots in space - one female and one male. The goal of the game was to tag the female robot and gain points. It was really adorable the way they floated around haha. I won't go into detail for the other ones because I don't know if it's confidential! Go try out for a hackathon if you wanna see all of the amazing ideas people have!
If ever there is another hackathon being held, I would definitely participate if I had the time. A great opportunity to learn, share ideas, meet new people and practice coding!
P.S I do have a version of our app deployed right now but I'd rather not share it until I have the data persistence and CSS fixed. Until then, here's a picture of two of us and our scribbled UI plan for the web app.
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