My First Hackathon Experience
Recently I participated in my first hackathon hosted by General Assembly. We were divided up into cross-functional teams, which consisted of UX designers, developers, and a data scientist. We were given a prompt and had four days to go through the full Software Development Life Cycle of planning, creating, developing, testing and deploying an application.
The Prompt:
How might we leverage local government open data resources to help citizens or businesses make more sustainable choices?
We discussed what we wanted to develop. We decided to go down the route of renewable energy. We went through a couple ideas that started with making a product that would provide information to homeowners about the financial benefits of getting solar panels.
After discussing that idea further we realized that we couldn’t really market that. We wouldn’t reach a large enough audience, because anyone who’s not already thinking about getting them would never use our product. So who thought would be the most financially motivated to use this product? We came up with our problem statement and solution.
Problem Statement:
There is a gap in the renewable energy market for a product that connects solar developers with potential clients. Creating a product that helps companies locate potential clients will not only allow them to be more profitable but will also impact the health of the planet as more buildings are utilizing these sustainable practices.
Solution:
Our solution utilizes building data to provide solar developers with information about emissions, energy usage, and current energy sources. This data would help them identify potential clients and improve lead generation for solar companies.
Our data scientist was able to gather and clean the past 5 years of public data of building energy usage in Boston. He identified that Quartile ranges were ideal guideposts for ranking customer suitability. Example: Highest Quartile of energy use = Highest Priority Leads.
With the data provided I was able to quickly create and seed a Postgres database, and design a backend. Now came the part of taking the UX designs and prototypes and bringing them to life in REACT. This was definitely the hardest part of the entire build, because as it was all of our first times working cross-functionally we had to come to an understanding of what was actually possible to build in this short time frame. As the “Lead Developer” I had to make hard decisions of what we could actually implement and communicate to the rest of the team what we were gonna be able to get done for the presentation(MVP) and what was gonna have to be left out for now.
We ended up taking home first place! Largely thanks to the fact that we were the only team that had an actual MVP product. As a developer I knew what was actually possible for us to build in that time frame and stressing the importance of having a functional product was more important than trying to implement too much and possibly not having MVP. I learned a lot about working/communicating on a cross-functional team, while taking a leadership role.
The future plans for this project are:
- Add to ranking algorithm
- Implement all prototype features
- More testing
