Wingify Hackathon Diary

Hackathons always inspire and recharges developers to innovate more. Wingify has always promoted the culture of Hackathons. Whilst we all get busy with our day-to-day, the Hackathon committee at Wingify consisting of Akansh Gulati, Kaushik Thirthappa, Kushagra Gour, Gaurav Nanda & Vijayenthiran Subramaniam organised the first Internal Wingify Hackathon of 2017. An online poll was conducted to select a theme for the Hackathon and we came up, “Solve your daily problem” theme. Wingifighters took to email to list down their daily problems and boy, are we glad we did that?!

Here were some responses –

The hackathon rules were very simple –

1. No technology restrictions.
2. No platform restrictions.
3. Try to develop a POC.
4. A maximum of 3 members are allowed in team.
5. Not mandatory to stay at the event.

Whilst we kicked off on 17th March, Kushagra came up with brilliant idea of setting up event in Delhi by writing all projects’ ideas on White Board and playing his coding songs playlist. At the same time, Kaushik in Pune, made sure that every participant enjoys the event in Pune.

This event got participation from not only developers but product managers and some interesting sales persons who chimed in their ideas and gave valuable feedback throughout the hackathon. Cheers to that !

As the time flew by, some brilliant ideas took the shape for demo. People took to solved problems from different verticals of our day to day lives. Some interesting problems were – keeping important notes and excerpts from articles online, simple exercises at your seat at multiple intervals of the day,  slouching, etc. Developers also worked on some interesting problems they face in their work such as automated scaling with digitalocean, better server up-time monitoring, awesome debug tools, etc.

Then finally, participants presenters presented their hacks and our judges, Paras Chopra, Sparsh Gupta and Ankit Jain, judged each project on the basis of innovation, efficiency and usability.

These are a few sneak peek of the event:

For the juicy part- the Winners.

Winner: Smart Chair

Members: Vijayenthiran Subramaniam

Vijay solved his slouching problem due to which he often gets neck pain and back pain after working. He created a very low cost but effective smart chair which tracks the user’s sitting position with the help of an ultrasonic sensor attached at the top of the chair. The chair uses Pushcrew’s API to alert the user when he/she slouches for more than 15 seconds and sits on the chair for more than an hour. The altering is achieved with the help of two vibrator motors attached at the back of the chair. Interestingly, the cost of the project (not including the power bank) is only around INR 500.

Runner’s Up Place:  VWO Analyzer

Members: Hemkaran Raghav, Pramod Dutta

VWO is a fairly huge and a complicated project, so Hemkaran and Pramod wanted a better debugging tool. This hackathon they built VWO X-Ray, a chrome extension created to easily debug VWO on any website the code. It showsneeds basic information about campaigns running on a particular page and displays user account id and cookies created by VWO.

It has a very simple and minimal setup and comes with great features like –

1. View account ID used on the page and impersonate into it directly.

2. View all campaigns fetched on the page and their basic information like which are running on the page, is segmentation passed for the campaign.

3. Directly open that specific campaign in single click into the app.

4. Directly copy the “Share report link” of the campaign and give it to anyone.

5. View VWO cookies information in detailed and clear view.

We’re sure this solves great pain points for all the developers at VWO.

Special thanks to Shailendra Viput & Gaurav Jassal (are super admin-team) in helping the hackathon committee organise this event.