AKL Hackfest - Team Aquarium

Our premium student skills development event for code & design students in the programme is Hackfest, a 2 day app-building challenge for teams of SoT2017 students. They’re supported by industry mentors, and the challenge this year was to use an API or dataset, and build something cool in a weekend, e.g. a web/mobile app or data visualisation.Here’s the profile of one of the teams from our Auckland Web Hackfest, held at GridAKL on the 26th & 27th August 2017:Team AquariumTeam: Fabian, Liam, Will, Kieran, Leah & Mentor AmirApp Name: Big FishWhat does it do? For university students, who are not sure what company is the best for their first work experience, we provide a social reviewing system to give them a better idea of how graduate-friendly companies are.What tools did you use to build it? We used TradeMe jobs API data. We used node.js on the back end and Angular for the front end, with material UI. Firebase was used for hosting and database management.Anything else you’d like to share about your Hackfest experience? 

I am a software engineer, yet I managed to do very little coding. I spent most of the weekend learning about approaches to startups such as lean canvas, continuous integration.. concepts like fail fast fail often. I think it was a really good learning experience and I am glad I wasn't coding so much, as this way I feel I really learned a lot.

Agile works, and I understand it much more now that I've actively used it. Our mentor was top notch, focusing us on what needed to be done, keeping us on track.

More photos

Some photos from the event are up on Facebook and there were a bunch of tweeted updates over the weekend too.