My experience at eCG Tech Hack 2020!
Last week I and a few of my CAMS colleagues participated in the 2020 eCG Virtual Tech Hack. The first eCG hackathon to be hosted fully online!
In previous years the eCG hackathons have been an in-person event, held all over the world. Due to the misfortune of covid, organisers decided to continue with the tradition but hold it online.
At Monday 11am AEDT the race began with the APAC kickoff event where we met our competitors and local organisers. What followed was an intense week of ideation and hacking! The theme of this year’s Virtual Tech Hack was:
“eCG mid- and post Covid-19. What problems were exposed and how do we solve for them?”
Pivot Pivot Pivot
Our team spent the first day sharing ideas and possibilities in our team Zoom workspace, trying to keep within the theme. The week was set up with scheduled team‘coaching’ sessions held wiht CTOs and other eCG brains — these proved invaluable. Our first meeting on Monday highlighted some flaws in our thinking and led us to pursue other angles. By the same time the next day we’d pivoted off that idea into something completely different: Gumtree Community —an add-on functionality to the Gumtree Au site that would focus on local communities and their small businesses, with the aim to bring in extra sellers and buyers.
The code!
With a concrete idea in mind, we set to hacking some demos based on a few designs. We decided to go with both an ios mobile app and a web app to showcase two experiences.
For the web app, we started work off the gumtree techstack which was completely new to me, opting to use thymeleaf as a front-end for the springboot based backend api we were going to set up. This proved to be another pivot point! Being unfamiliar with thymleaf and unable to make much progress, I eventually decided to swap to something I knew better (after a long night!); react.js.
Pitch your idea!
The week consisted of 3 end-of-day presentations of increasing importance; where we pitched our idea to a jury consisting of eCG business & tech leaders, who had an opportunity to ask us questions after our presentations. This was a great glimpse into the thought required & given to new tech ideas, and helped us iterate on our idea through the week. Our final nerve-wracking presentation went off without a hitch and Though we didn’t end up winning the competition, we put up a good fight and grabbed a bag of tech hack achievements!
A great time for all!
Thanks to the 2020 Tech Hack organisers for putting up such a great event despite the covid limitations! And congrats to Devs of the Dead for their victory! It was great to see that an online hackathon can still result in great teamwork & ideas.
