Soft Jobs
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I participated in the Social Good Hackathon 2021 hosted by JP Morgan Chase. During that, we are given a challenge that aligned with an idea of a project I already wanted to create.
The objective was to be able to create a web application to help demystify and incentivize a career in software engineering.
We approached the problem with an "Everyone is good at python, so let's use python" approach to the problem. We come up with the idea of a quiz and that to help with the process. That quiz would also incorporate a database that would 1. Store results 2. Get correct results 3. Update Results for matches 4. Display said results Very simple, but we had only 10 hours so of course we can always add more but not having anything to show is worse.
Started the morning an hour ahead of our time zone, and 8 am is too freaking early for me. We were waking up the first 2 hours and on a different page until 10 am when we all get on the same page and get to work. It is going smoothly until Django came into play. Implementation and coding were harder than expected. A team member thought he could do it but the challenge was more than he alone could handle so at noon we came together and discussed. We had 2 options, struggle through Django and have more people try and learn it, switch the programming language completely. Since we had a little more knowledge on how it would work in another area, scrapped that backend and replaced it with MongoDB. We got rolling on that one and our first mentor left us. I am not quite sure what a mentor does, but I guess we didn't need anything in this brainstorming phase. We got down to the code and the train started rolling. Everyone knew their roles and everyone knew what needed to be done so it went semi smoothly, that is until the time was getting near the end. A backend issue was popping up and at this point, the front end was presentable, but the backend data was not getting to the front. We sought help, but after debugging, everyone came back together and pulled off something very close to what the goal was. Time was up and we had results. We had the outline, logic, idea, and could covey those to the panel when we did our presentation. I was happy to be a part of this team.
Well, that wasn't the end of it. We were told we had to submit but could add on more until the presentation the next day and it wasn't quite how we liked so the next day, some team members put in the work to get it more functional and fix the bugs to make a really good program that we would be proud to present. I had fun with this project and other groups when presenting had way more complex ideas that were awesome. I could have been a part of any of those teams, but I got put in this one, and once we got the feedback of our idea being "unique" and 'having a target audience"..... I wouldn't change anything during those 48 hours. The Good, The Bad, or The Ugly
We have some working code, it is able to do everything that we expected and come up with a good presentation by the time it was time to present. Lots of ideas in the future and I am definitely going to try and finish this project because it can be useful and feel like it can help people who are just getting into college.
Phillip Smith, Sam Howard, Kevin Ibanez, Nicole Tran, Jacob Ward