#hacksummit

I rarely watch any webinars. Watching a video on technical topic for too long becomes boring after a while. But it was different yesterday when i watched Hack.Summit() for continuously 3 hours at stretch. It was so non-boring and interesting that it kept me glued to my laptops screen.

It is undoubtedly largest virtual conference. https://hacksummit.org/ 

Data 2.0 hosted their first ever hackathon that was not part of a conference. They ran this one as a tester for a bigger one to take place later in the fall that is supposed to be amazing.

What sets them apart from other hackathons is that they have a social network for the event. When they first mentioned this and I looked at it online, it looked pretty dumb in my opinion. The site wasn't fully developed and looked like it was treated like some side project and not a main focus of the event. When they explained what their vision was for it though, I was impressed. 

They found that there were a lot of teams that would go to hackathons, build a product, then go to another hackathon the next weekend and build the same thing. This seemed like a terrible trend, and they were setting out to fix this with their social network. Once you make a profile on the social network you now have that project carry over into the next hackathon, allowing you to build on the functionality of the last project or just not repeat yourself without others knowing.

The theme of the project was to help empower companies or people to have a big impact on the Bay Area (or the world). My project idea was a simple app that would benefit my company specifically and hopefully help others). 

We at ZenPayroll try to go out for lunch every Wednesday, and we have found that as we grow, there are fewer and fewer restaurants that will take us, and the personal feeling of going out for lunch is often lost in the crowd. Our fix was to have a script with everyone's names that would shuffle us and assign us into groups that would then be assigned restaurants.

This was still pretty manual and didn't take into account whether people were going out (someone on support always needs to stay in), who was not in the office/on vacation that day, variety (making sure a group wasn't all engineers), and what restaurant each individual went to last week. Our app would do all this and if we were really lucky, it would also make the reservations with opentable as well.

My team consisted of myself and a classmate who just arrived for an internship at SmugMug for the summer, Andres. I had only competed with Andres once before at my first hackathon (NASA SpaceApps) and was really excited to see how far we had come and what we could accomplish.

Working for 24 hours at Change.org's HQ we managed to reach MVP with the exception that we did not put a physical button to text the attendees with options for the different restaurants (but we could do it from console), and we were not properly handling the responses from those texts.

Overall we now have a decent app at fieldtrip-it.herokuapp.com that you will be able to use after about another week of development. Ideally I would like to finish it for this Wednesday's lunch but realistically that will not happen. In a month I would like to have opentable/yelp and iCal integration as well for auto scheduling/replying/reserving. 

Our long-term goal would be to make this usable for all events, with the specific goal of being able to split my team into small groups and reserve times for community service at different locations (our favorite is GLIDE so thats the specific one we will shoot for) based on the availability in their calendars.