ConUHacks

On January 23th and 24th, I attended my first Hackathon. It was the ConUHacks at Concordia. It was an extraordinary experience. For those who do not know what a hackathon is … it has nothing to do with security. It is a contraction of the words “hack” and “marathon”!

The objective during a hackathon is to produce something during a given time. For ConUHacks, we had 24 hours and there was no specific theme. Sponsors were proposing contests with prizes, so me and my team of 4 people chose the try the contest of Air Transat. The challenge was to create an application for young travelers.

The food was delicious !

Final presentation to the judges

We are working hard

Opening ceremony

For our project, we decided to develop a website. We created a database with static data. The backend was in python and sqlite, while the front-end was made in Bootstrap. The website offered 3 countries of Eastern Europe, highly prized by backpack travelers. Once the user entered the country that interested him, the website offered 3 random cities in the chosen country. Then each city offered 3 activities according to tags that interest the most young people: food, adventure and discovery (culture, museums, etc.).

During that weekend, I learned a lot about teamwork and about myself. The time was very short to complete this application. so we had the big challenge of agreeing on what we wanted to deliver at the end of the hackathon. It’s much more difficult to get a team of 4 people to take decisions that all the team members are happy with. We realized that it adds an extra challenge. We had some pitfalls but ended with a “group hug” and a lot of fun!

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Now, I watch every announce about a hackathon in Montreal or in Toronto ! 🙂
This project is on DevPost and GitHub !