It was the 9th and 10th of November that GDG Brunei DevFest took place and I was lucky enough to be physically there to help run the event and Hackathon. It was a fun, and as with all things tech, there were technical difficulties but you live and you learn.
We split the hackathon into 2 sections: 1 for competing and 1 for learning. I tried to take the OpenTechSchool approach by giving them some resources and being around if they had any questions. I have to say that I really did enjoy going from table to table to see what people were working on and interact with them.
The hackathon document we shared is available at http://gdg.com.bn/hackathon_doc and is a work in progress. Below is some feedback I have for the teams that participated in the hackathon and I myself do welcome any feedback on the way we ran the event and the document shared.
RTB Connect
- A good consolidation of links, but need to work on focus and polish (be more than just a collection of links to the website)
ITB+
- Feature complete (minus the demo fail, given benefit of doubt that it works) and solves their problem at hand
- Had good future expansion idea of using GCM for messaging
- Suggestion to possibly use 3rd party logins (e.g. Facebook / Twitter / OpenID) as seemed like yet another login mechanism
- Felt that the novelty and community aspects were lacking
Prograstinators : Foodish
- Looks nice and a good social crowd sourcing idea
- Design seems to be a fixed mobile width only (would suggest responsive design)
- Not so novel: similar idea to Urbanspoon and Find Me Food
- Seem to be the folks from http://www.morningmobi.com | http://cikgu.tv | http://www.megabond-productions.com (all the best in your other ventures) (p.s. I got the MorningMobi link in the source code of your page)
Order Easy
- A good use of WordPress as the CMS
- Extra points from me for using the Raspberry Pi!
- Seems like a good business solution but felt community aspect was lacking
Panda Codes
- Would suggest trying to use some responsive web design frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap / Zurb Foundation to make it usable for mobile
- I think I saw that if a user registered, they could see the entire user registration listing. Regular users shouldn’t see such information and that should only be shown to admins
- -Presentation tip: prefill the form fields before hand. Took quite a while to fill in the form, and with a 2 minute presentation limit, it just wastes time
Find me Food
- Good effort and hope you all learned how to build a web app. Keep at it and learn
MJL
- A nice native Android app look
- Liked the crowd sourcing nature to solve a problem which contributed to the novelty and community aspects
- Obviously wasn’t fully complete but the finish and design did look nice and seems to be on the right track
- Looking forward to seeing it on the Play Store
WTS
- Nice use of GPS location and extracting data from Google maps
- A good effort and the social good is there
If any of the participants would like to plug their own company / apps / on-goings, feel free to post a comment below. We also hope to have more events like this in the future, with a community aspect to it, so if you have ideas just throw them in and we’ll see what we can do! Hope to see you all at the next corner…
The Wheat Field 