Hey all. How are you? I hope this post finds you and your families well.
I participated in my first Hackathon yesterday.
It was immense !
The organisational skills were absolutely epic, cloudthing provided the REMO platform which was great. I hadn’t used it before and it made for a super easy to use collaborative environment.
The hackathon was an opportunity for students who had participated in the 8 week Power Platform course to show their stuff and partner with professionals in the Power Platform space to build a solution based on one of 4 different topics.
After an amazing inspirational intro from Tricia Sinclair who explained what the Power Platform school was all about we got started.
The PPSchool is all about helping those people who want to transition into tech roles and notably focussing on the BAME community. It was very humbling to watch the introduction and gave a real purpose to the event.
Will Dorrington then explained the different scenarios and how hackathons were all about collaboration, planning and having fun ! We then got to “work”.
Our team was comprised of Larry Merkelis, Mark Ward and the Power Platform school participant Oko Azu. We chose the idea and got to planning using REMO’s whiteboard feature.
Oko’s wife had an eyelash website that he had made, so we decided to build a Power Virtual Agent chat bot to take bookings for eye lash technicians from customers. For the back office Larry created a Model Driven app for administering the product catalog and service offered. Mark and Oko concentrated on the very definite pink canvas app for the lash technicians to check what customers had been booked to them, while I concentrated on the chat bot. All of this was then built on top of some custom Dataverse tables for bookings, services, lashes etc.
We built all of this in 5 hours. It was a great team collaborative effort. Oko even said that he thought we had worked together for a long time before the hackathon but we had never met.
This was a great compliment (thank you!) and made me think that if you stick to a process and plan well then all kinds of great things can happen. Mark was immense at the canvas app and the early requirement gathering. That was really important and we were able to tap into Oko’s knowledge of his wife’s eyelash business to help flesh out that plan.
I loved everything about the day from meeting new people, to being in a super collaborative tech environment, to the planning and organisation that had obviously gone into everything for the day.
Here is our finished solution -
Special thanks to the judges and the TDG team for putting everything together.