First Hackathon Experience
I decided to overcome imposter syndrome last Friday, I participated in a hackathon by flutterwave (my first actually). I joined a team that was formed there. It wasn’t easy as everyone was looking for Javascript experts to partner with. Finally, I later got a team.
We started brainstorming on ideas that we can implement in less than 30+ hours. After several trial and error, we settled for a medical appointment app that allows you too book appointment based on doctors availability. You would receive a call as a reminder, a day to your appointment and a Google Calendar notification. We delegated tasks and my part was to implement all the API’s needed (Twilio, G Calendar). It was really tasking. I researched on it, started with the Google Calendar API, I couldn’t understand the implementation and left it for the next day.
Day 2
I started from where I stopped but all prove abortive. I jumped to the next API by integrating twilio. Luckily for me, I had set up an account before and was blessed with a trial credit (about $14). It was easy for me to integrate with PHP. After that I went back to implement the Google Calendar. At first it was able to get the authenticated user’s events on calendar but couldn’t create an event.
It was already time to submit the code to github and we weren’t done. As a team all other things were handled by others, the frontend design, slide presentation. We merged the code and submitted.
It was time for pitching, our team was called upon, we were given 10 minutes to present. The team head made the presentation. The judges asked few questions and made some contributions which added to my learning experience:
What I learnt:
- I was able to integrate Twilio voice call to our app.
- How to setup a Google Calendar.
- Working with a team to improve learning.
- No idea is a waste, just implement and make more research.
As a team what you need to know
- Research more on your problem and loom for possible solutions similar to yours.
- Engage everyone.
- Everyone should be prepared to talk/pitch (judges might ask question).
- Be confident about your product.
- Have a nice presentation.
While the results was out we didn’t make the top 3 but we were satisfied with the experience and hoping to work more on our lapses.
Thank you for reading.
Kudos to the organizers
for sparking the interest of students.@Dscunilag
