Africa-Press – Seychelles. The 24-hour Hackathon competition is finally over and the winners and prizes will be announced and given on May 17, 2023 to coincide with World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD).
The competition was hosted at the UniSey after a three-year hiatus due to the Covid pandemic. The main challenge was to empower less developed countries with information and development technology.
Press spoke with senior analyst of DICT, Kevin Marie, to gather his thoughts on how the event went.
“The overall success in regards to participant engagement, was really great,” he stated. “The team collaboration was on point as they divided their tasks in a way that they could provide something to the judges after 24 hours.”
He went on to say that some projects were great for some participants but exceptional for others.
The participants had some issues with internet connectivity at the start of the hackathon, but then it immediately picked up soon after.
“But, we did notify the teams to bring their own modems if available as backup.”
In terms of if everything was on point, Mr Marie stated that the “coordinating team operated in an efficient way and everything went smoothly along with rotation of the supervising officers. They made sure the participants were catered for their comfort.”
DICT will now do a post-mortem to see how the entire competition went, to see where they could improve upon.
“Also, a feedback form will be sent to the participants in regards to their experience so that we’ll have a better understanding of their point of view of the event.”
Neil Nicholas discussed a little bit about what his team went through in the 24 hours. “I started designing the structure and the application. My teammates worked on the UX and the UI and they finished it around 3am. So then I worked on the back end.” He continued to explain that the back end took most of the day from midday until 2pm. The basic components such as calculating the budget, was already finished with the UI and UX design but was not connected to the back end for the database. In conclusion, there were some aspects of the App which were completed and a few aspects which the team did not have a chance to complete.
Mr Nicholas was joined by his teammates Sandrine Madeleine and Shayane Ouimel Hoareau.
Danio Marcelin, from the other three-member team, told that he was exhausted after the 24-hour competition.
“I feel happy but exhausted, an app that would have taken me a month to code, took me around 18 hours due to our team work.” He stated that it was way tougher than he expected, especially with 24 hours of sleep deprivation and straight coding.
The best thing he took away from this experience was “learning to be a part of the team because I usually work alone”. In addition, he learnt communication and time management were all key in his experience.
Sunny Esparon
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