#D17hack

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Day at Dynamo Hack

On 3rd July, I got an opportunity to attend Dynamo Hackathon. During the second week of June I received a mail from Accenture about the Dynamo summit and hackathon. I registered my interested and, soon I received few emails and an invite to join Dynamo slack. Even though this was not my first hackathon, I was growing anxious. With numerous conversations over the slack, emails and Skype, I came to know that I would be placed in a small team of 5-6 people and would be expected to produce a minimal viable product(MVP) within 8 hours. The MVP would then be judged by a panel from Dynamo. The theme of the hackathon was to promote and showcase the technical skills and technical capabilities within North East.

The team composed of people from various companies, such as Accenture, CapGemini, Sage, DWP, and HMRC; and with multiple skills. I was excited to be a part of team that was equally talented, and eager to connect with each other. The team conceptualised an idea before joining the hack. After multiple rounds of discussion, we settled to create visualisation of the skill gap in NE.

Although BBC had predicted rain on the day, it turns out to be a lovely sunny day. It was a scenic drive from Newcastle to Durham. Thanks to Adnrew, who offered me a lift from Central Station. We reach the historic city of Durham by 7:45AM and joined other team members at Durham university.

As planned, we started to develop a visualisation portal to aid new graduates or job seekers to hunt jobs within a specific region. The visualisation would show various companies available within a specific region and their job requirements. Along with the job vacancies, the portal would link to free/paid online training available to bridge the skill gap.

After a rigorous brain storming, we chose to subscribe to Indeed API to fetch the job requirements and Google API/MS tableau to visualise the same. The team decided to fetch the data from Indeed API and populate it in a local instance of Mongo. The plan was to utilise Mongo db to create some more stats and trends if we left with some extra time. We broke the application into 3 components: - Component 1 - batch script that would subscribe Indeed API and populate local Mongo Instance, - Component 2 - a front end that would visualize the data as the per the user requests, and, - Component 3 - a Scala backend that would query local Mongo instance to provide filtered results to the front end

The great thing about the team was that we all had different strengths and we worked incredibly well together. After few initial technical hiccups all the three components were available. It was funny to observe how quickly the time passes when you are surrounded by determined and equally caffeinated people.

We were all set to integrate the components, but we hit our biggest road block. Among all of us, two of us were Ubuntu, one was linux Mint, another one was Windows 10 and the last one was MacOS. We were couple of hours away from the demo and there was no single machine that could run all the three components. By random selection and trust in Steve Jobs, we all chose to work/fix on MacOS. We managed to complete our MVP, when clock turned red to show last 10 min remaining for the hack.

It was certainly an event full of learning and I enjoyed it a lot. All the teams came up with some amazing MVPs. I will look forward for Dynamo to arrange such events in future.