WLG Hackfest - Team Finder

Student Stories

22 Aug

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 Wellington Web Hackfest, held at Flux Federation on the 12th & 13th August 2017:Team FinderTeam: Shona (Designer), David, Dong, Vivienne, Latrell (Developers), Daniel (Mentor)App Name: FinderWhat does it do? We wanted to create an application that allowed users to search for local events, both paid and free, based on a desired budget. The intention was to allow users to find events based on their location and desired time frame, refined by a budget that they could afford. We felt this product would appeal greatly to people of all ages and demographics, with a particular interest in budget-conscious individuals, as well as travellers/tourists who want to make the most of their time in any given location.What tools did you use to build it? EventFinda API, Google Places API (EventBrite API, Here API were also used during the weekend). We utilised Node Express, JS, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap for the backend and frontend development.Anything else you’d like to share about your Hackfest experience?

As a team, I can comfortably say we enjoyed the experience. While our final product lacked the aesthetic appeal we would have liked, we were able to largely produce an application that reflected our goal for a minimum viable product. We had an opportunity to meet some fantastic individuals to share this experience with, and gained valuable experience in a variety of new developmental tools/programs under the mentorship of Daniel and the other mentors.For me personally, Hackfest was an exciting chance to dive head first into the industry I hope to succeed in one day, it was an incredibly valuable learning experience and we are grateful to have had the chance to take part.