This is my first post ever and still don’t know if it will be the last one since I don’t consider myself a good writer, but I decided to do it for few reasons:
Alright, everything started over July (2016), when I received one of the thousands meetup email notifications and this one particularly got my attention because it says: [ Women Who Code + Hack ] :-D My first thoughts were “Oh yes, an opportunity to jump in into the community again” (after moving jobs I was kind of away trying to settle down in my awesome new position ), then my next step was who I could ask to join and form a team who wanted to have fun, build good stuff and go to Belfast. I asked @sofiatzima, Miuki Miu and Hyrla Miranda, 3 members from Women Who Code Dublin who I knew were really geeky, nerdy and passionate to say yes straight away, and guess what I wasn’t wrong because they accepted. We were looking for a new member but couldn’t find someone so we just created our group and after submission of the group regarding our personal details, We were almost ready to Hack but and here it come the things to overcome.
As Non-EU national, If I want to travel to the UK, I would require a visa to enter, which I usually have but it was already expired for this year, [ ok, ok think quickly what are your options and don’t let down your team ] , here a list of what options I had:
The solution I picked? The third one obviously, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to be there, fortunately I received pretty good feedback from the organisers Conor Graham and @gecol (Gillian Colan) and they said to me if my team didn’t have a problem to have me remotely they were cool about it.
Ok , first problem or issue was solved, now move on to organise our team to make us awesome and prepared to hack.
We had a hangouts group created since we created the team, and with only 3 weeks away from the day, we gathered together to check out our skills, advantages, disadvantages and ideas for what we wanted to built, how many hours we have and how to get to the venue + miscellaneous chats about how our days were going [ believe me, living in Ireland and working on IT is a signal your days could be passing really fast without realising it ].
Our team is getting ready for #HackTheHub #wwcodeDublin @hackthehub see you soon ✌ pic.twitter.com/7NEuVUQ8PF
— Laura Uzcátegui (@laura_uzcategui) August 20, 2016
We just met at starbucks and as you can see neither of us are living at Northern Ireland, and the team for the hackaton was “Code for making NI Better”, I started thinking about similar events here in Dublin, and I remembered @codeforall_ire initiative, so I decided to apply:
If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.
First idea: my boss lives in Belfast, so I asked him in one of our meetings if he could help with ideas about how to make Belfast better, what problems he encountered for the community and so on, and he suggested I better talked to his wife who was coming to our Work summer fair, which I did, and she and himself spent a little of time explaining cool things that they would love to see in Belfast. ( Yes, our idea came from asking the community about their needs).
Back to our meeting at starbucks, I explained the girls the idea, about creating an app that would allow people from the community or new people who are just moving to Belfast to learn about the community, the culture or certain topics of interest through check-in the app and attending to meetings. Cool ! We had now an idea that liked us all :-) and we decided to make it awesome, interesting and easy to use through gamification.
We didn’t code any single line of code that day, just did some drawings over paper and put a name to our app : BelConnect ( Belfast + Connection ), and why we didn’t code was pretty obvious, it was not ethical and fair with the other teams and ourselves.
That day, we left the coffee shop knowing few things:
Over the meeting we talked about trying to create a REST API and as I love self-learning and get curious about new things, I said to myself it was a good time to play around with REST frameworks and as all of us has experience with Python but not with its frameworks and integrations with AngularJS or Ionic as an example, it seemed this was a good opportunity to get dirty and learn it. So I started researching about Python REST Frameworks and I found this post which led me to ideas.
I decided to start using my Code School scholarship awarded by Women Who Code (few months back), for learning Django and spent my following weekends doing this course and its screencast which led me to create on github almost successfully the projects given over the course. If you are curious about the result take a look to the repos linked below. [ It’s not perfect , but it covers the essentials of Django that I need for the hackaton] .
TreasureGram and TravelTracker
laurauzcategui/djangocode
djangocode - Try Django Code School Coursegithub.com
Directory App
Lessons learnt from this:
Girls left really early for the hackaton ( 5 a.m or so ), I woke up at 7.30 made some breakfast for myself and sit down into my table as comfy as possible, after all We were about to spend 10–12 hours coding.
Quick timeline:
Countdown is 0. We are done. :-)
We ended up and our results were:
Wonderful pitch from the Women Who Code Dublin team #HackTheHub pic.twitter.com/4yEPSDWFgz
— #HackTheHub (@hackthehub) September 10, 2016
If you are curious about our work, you can of course go to our repo and take a look and even better if you feel good, collaborate we don’t bite :-) there is still lots of work to be done.
hack-the-hub/belconnect
belconnect - Make NI Better - WWCDublin Teamgithub.com
To be honest, I didn’t expect to have as much fun as I had, working remotely could have ended up horrible and messy or awesome and terrific experience ( which it was ) If I look back and do a retrospective over my first experience [ Facebook Hackaton — Hack for Equality, which wasn’t as productive as this one, I only would say:
#HacktheHub kit and prize with me now. thanks @ConorG763 @hackthehub @WomenWhoCode @Aepona pic.twitter.com/OzE00odMxN
— Laura Uzcátegui (@laura_uzcategui) September 12, 2016
I hope you like my first post. See you around when the muse of writing comes to me again ;-).
Best ,
Laura
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