Hackathons are not just for programmers

Photo by Kaur Kristjan on Unsplash

This year, I participated in a Hack Day event hosted by my firm, Moody’s Analytics. We had two days to develop actionable product concepts that solves a relevant business problem. This was my first hackathon ever. With little coding experience, I was extremely skeptic about participating. I have a good understanding of technology but actually building something from scratch? I was not so sure if I could do it. Additionally, I have always thought of hackathons as something that dedicated programmers participated in. I don’t know how I decided to go forward with it.

But I’m glad I did! Our team won the second place this year. In addition to exciting prizes for the team, Moody’s also donated $500 to an organization of our choice. (And we chose ‘Girls Who Code’). So what is it that we did?

Our Solution:

Our product was a contact tracing tool that invites public to share information about themselves and observe patterns of potential COVID cases in local communities. The collected data would then be used to generate scores using a weighted calculation model and presented as heat maps to show well-being by neighborhood.

The Need:

During that time, contact tracing was still performed at a national level while federal, state & local governments needed much more granular data & insights to make critical decisions.

We saw the need for a platform that can help determine how cases in a neighborhood can affect local businesses, availability of test kits, and preparedness as a community. We also saw value in combining this crowdsourced public health data with our existing solutions to provide actionable insights to our clients

The Technology:

We used Angular 7 & Firebase for developing the web application; Python for aggregation & calculation; AWS Lambda serverless computing for running the application. Finally, we generated heatmaps through the use of KML Layers on Google Maps API.

The Takeaways from our experience (that also contributed to the success):

1. We approached it the way we would approach any product launch. We looked at the core functionalities (MVP) that this product should have and focused on developing a quick POC. This helped us figure out what worked, what didn’t and iterate on it.
2. We focused on communicating the idea as a story and shared our experiences in building this solution
3. We participated without any expectations. We focused on learning and making this a fun experience.
4. Each of us picked areas that would improve our skillset. We also pitched in whenever someone was stuck and helped each other out.

The event changed my outlook on hackathons. It turned out to be an amazing way to spend two days with a group of talented people and learn new technologies. On the technical front, I got to brush up on Javascript & learned about customizing Maps through KML, MapBox & ArcGIS. But mostly, I learned how important it is to have team members with growth mindset. As a team, we relied on each other’s expertise and willingness to learn.

Thanks to my teammates for making this event memorable. Last, but certainly not the least, thanks to Moody’s for organizing this event.