Hackathons Life at Wingify

Hacking away the night at Wingify

March 23, 2017

Hackathons always inspire developers to innovate more. Wingify has always promoted the culture of Hackathons. Whilst we all get busy with our day-to-day work, the Hackathon committee at Wingify consisting of Akansh Gulati, Kaushik Thirthappa, Kushagra Gour, Gaurav Nanda and Vijayenthiran Subramaniam organised the first Internal Wingify Hackathon of 2017 in February. An online poll was conducted to select a theme and we came up with, “Solve your daily problem” themeWingifighters took to email to list down their daily problems and boy, ain’t we glad we did that?

Here are some of the responses:

The hackathon rules were simple:

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

Kushagra came up with the brilliant idea of setting up the event in Delhi by listing down all ideas on a whiteboard and playing his coding songs playlist. Meanwhile, Kaushik ensured every participant enjoyed the event in Pune.

While it was obvious that the event was dominated by developers, what was interesting was that some product managers and salespersons also came up with interesting ideas.

As time flew by, some brilliant ideas took shape in the form of real products. People solved different everyday problems?—?from saving excerpts while reading articles online to remembering to exercise while in the same position for long to correcting oneself from slouching, among others. Developers also worked on some interesting problems they face in their work such as automated scaling with Digital Ocean, better server up-time monitoring, awesome debug tools, among others.

Finally, all hacks were judged by Paras Chopra, Sparsh Gupta and Ankit Jain on three parameters?—?innovation, efficiency and usability.

Here are a few pictures from the day:

We had two winners.

Winner one: Smart Chair

Members: Vijayenthiran Subramaniam

Vijay solved his problem of slouching while working (due to which he often got neck pain and back pain). He created a 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.

Winner two: VWO X-Ray

Members: Hemkaran Raghav and Pramod Dutta

VWO is a fairly huge and a complicated project so Hemkaran and Pramod wanted a better debugging tool. They built VWO X-Ray, a chrome extension created for Wingifighters (internal company use only) to easily debug VWO on any website. It shows basic information about campaigns running on a particular page and 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 and impersonate that account directly.

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

3. Directly open the specific campaign through a single click in the app.

4. Directly copy the ‘Share report link’ of the campaign and share it with 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, Rajeev Singh and Gaurav Jassal (our super awesome admin team) in helping the hackathon committee organize this event.

We are all waiting for our next hack-the-night to happen soon 🙂

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