The Selleo community prides itself on its unique knowledge-sharing culture, where the community is most important. Every month, there comes a day when we enjoy an internal day called Haxorz. It is a day dedicated to networking, exchanging ideas, discussing projects and working together to solve problems.
In January, we have decided to host a Hackathon during Haxorz to build something amazing together.
Let’s start with some background information
The engineers participating in the programming marathon were divided into teams through a random draw and each one of them had its own Product Owner. They had 4 hours to create an amazing solution that will not only wow their opponents but also proves to be useful for the entire community. Let’s take a look at the final products.
Addressing the company-wide issue: Better Parking App
The first parking app created during the Hackathon (we will talk about the competition later on). The main goal of the application is to seamlessly integrate not only the booking functionality but also the ability to open or close the automatic gates guarding our private parking spaces.
The solution enables each employee to book a specific free parking spot, which can be handy when visiting another office location. It is synchronized with the booking exceptions page in our company dashboard, so the person going on holiday automatically ‘frees’ his/her slot for others to take. The parking places are up for grabs each day after 6PM when the booking schedule clears.
As mentioned, the app also combines the option for opening the electric gates to the parking zone, so there’s no need for any gate pilots.
The team consisted of 8 people, including 2 designers. For the technology stack, they used React.js, Supabase, Netlify and Vite.js.
Take a look at how it looks like:
DevOps made easier: DevOops App
The app came to life to solve some DevOps problems developers may face including lack of standards, speedy hand-offs, security issues or lack of proper documentation. The idea was to build a tool similar to Heroku but based on our internal tools, where we could collect our versioned Terraform modules that can be added to the project.
For example, if you happen to be in need of storage for your project, you can simply add S3 and a Terraform module will be automatically implemented. The long-term goal of the project is to make application setup, deployment and day-to-day operations a real breeze. What is more, every developer should be able to manage it with ease.
Here the team consisted of 7 people including 1 graphic designer. The tech stack included React and Rails, which will be later replaced by Golang.
Get to know yourself: Moving Motivation Cards
The application’s main idea is to determine the main motivators of people within a team as well as to help ensure the proper fit of projects for developers. However, the solution can be used not only locally, by the Selleo community, but also worldwide, for employees in various fields. Our developers ensured it is available on both desktop and mobile devices.
The solution has an embedded admin panel with team details as well as a user panel.
The development team consisted of 8 software engineers including graphic designers, QA specialists and 1 Product Owner.
Interactive parking: Parking App no.2
As you may know, we have 3 offices with 5 independent parking locations. Here we have got the second parking app (can you see we have some issues with that?), but this time, with a great focus on the interactive map of free parking slots. The team also implemented a map of available parking spots which drivers can choose from and book them in advance.
There were 9 developers working on this project and 1 designer with React and Rails as the main technologies.
A day full of fun: Amusement Park Map
The app was created as an answer to a real-life inquiry we got some time ago. This interactive map can be used to navigate through complicated alleys of amusement parks. The application has an embedded attraction list with detailed descriptions, which are shown on the map. It also has the ability to provide users with the fastest route to their chosen destination using the GPS location from their smartphones.
The last team consisted of 7 developers, a graphic designer and a QA specialist and they combined React with a back-end JavaScript framework Nest.js with Leaflet library.
Summary
After the 4 hours of development, team leaders presented their products, which were later rated by the rest of the Selleo community. The most popular app turned out to be the Parking app, which, in the future, has the potential to be released. We are also working on Moving Motivation Cards and hope to launch it soon.
It was a really successful Hackathon and we aim to make use of this form of Haxorz events more often. Once we do, we will surely write about it. Until then!
Want to see more? Check out this video recap!
