Another Hackathon, Another Story
Last week, I attended my second hackathon, which is called Nurture Difference Hackathon. It was organized by Flatiron school, so Flatiron alumni have a chance to collaborate with others. When I saw an announcement about this hackathon, I am excited to join because I will have a new portfolio on my resume. Usually, other hackathons give approximately 36 hours, but Flatiron allows us to finish the project for a week, and all teams must present to other participants. let me share with you how my team can tackle this hackathon.
As usual, I messaged my hackathon team CEO, Alyssa E Easterly (LOL) because she always has a great idea for a hackathon. I even don’t really understand what is the meaning of “Nurture Difference” which’s why I asked Alyssa. She replied to me back with a long message about her idea,
and of course, I agree with that. Because the hackathon is short, we should think of a simple impactful idea. After brainstorming the idea with Alyssa, I started to organize the team member, and I contacted Jacob Kagon and Mauro Dorigo-Cortes. They were also interested in it.
We can’t start to code before Monday, but I know we should optimize our time, so we met to discuss all our plans early. We prepared for the functionality, User Interface, database design, and development process. Because we realized that we still need to learn about CSS and responsive, we challenged ourselves to build a responsive app without any CSS framework. Also, we used Next.js for the front-end, Rails for the back-end, and Firebase for the authentication. This is a really great project because we don’t really have a great experience with this stack, but we want to try to expand our knowledge.
The day when the hackathon was started, we luckily got another team member, Njeri Kamau. On the first day, we still focus on planning our apps because we want to make this web to be responsive, so we should create a clear mobile view UI. We learned that building a responsive app should start from a mobile view, and we implemented the approach to this project. I feel the mobile-first approach is efficient because according to Kevin Powell, a website is already responsive without any CSS. You can watch his video about why we should write CSS for mobile view first here.
For our project management, we utilized Trello to manage our development process. I organized the task list for each member, and we did a stand-down meeting every night. The purpose of the stand-down meeting was to report everything that we have done on that day, and we also planned new tasks for the next day. Therefore, my team understands what they should start in the morning.
The main idea of our project is a journaling app that makes the users understand more about themself and others. The Garden provides several questions with three different topics (Gratitude, Inner Peace, and Relationships). Users could choose the topics and answer the question in order to do a reflection about themself. After users answer the question, they can create some actionable goals.
Attending a hackathon is tiring, but it is a great chance to showcase your skills, and you can realize, which part of the skills that you must improve. After I challenged myself to build a responsive website using vanilla CSS, I feel more confident to develop the responsive app. Building a responsive app without knowing the basic is really painful, and Nurture Difference Hackathon motivate me to learn CSS in deep. Even though I was not the team lead, I learned from this hackathon that being a team lead is challenging. I have a dream one day I can be a great team leader in the future.
Website: https://the-nurturing-garden.vercel.app/
Frontend Repository : https://github.com/jacobkagon/garden-frontend
Backend Repository: https://github.com/raaynaldo/garden-backend
