Hackathon 2020 by Teravision

Introduction

Teravision is a company that is 100% committed to the professional and personal growth of its development team. This means that with innovation as one of our core values, we make sure that all of our developers are using the latest in technologies and best practices, while keeping them sharp with challenging projects that push them to be the best versions of themselves!

As part of our initiative to incentivize growth by acquiring new skills and outside-the-box thinking, based on an initial encounter with another Hackathon event where we were invited to witness, in 2020 we organized an internal 48 hour Hackathon event. This was headed by Franz Silva, Raul Escobar and Roberto Ramirez, all revolving around Google’s new exciting technology, Flutter!

What is a Hackathon?

You might be thinking to yourself, “Well, I’m new to the industry, so quick question: what is a Hackathon?”. Well, a Hackathon is a competition where groups of developers from different branches of the software development industry (such as mobile & web developers, project managers, graphic designers and others), compete in teams to develop fully functional software or hardware by the end of the event.

Hackathons are also comparable to their more mainstream counterparts called Game Jams, where the objectives are similar, although the general purpose of Game Jams are more theme oriented and made to incentivize creativity. Hackathons are more technical, looking to showcase a specific programming language or API integration throughout the development cycle.

Our main inspiration for creating our own event were the dynamics used by companies like Techstars. Here, teams follow a startup week work dynamic, creating MVPs in the form of sales pitches and presentations to better understand the startup lifestyle. This, combined with the more product-oriented approach of Hackathons and client figures to better simulate a project environment, makes for an event that gives a complete entrepreneurial experience while also providing an opportunity to learn about and use a new technology to expand each participant’s skillset.

As mentioned previously, our internal event required each team to use Flutter as the leading programming language and the final product had to benefit the organization as a whole or a specific department. Also, the teams had the option of picking a predefined product provided by the event’s organizers, or developing an original idea, all with the intention of creating a solution that would be beneficial to Teravision internally.

Why Flutter?

Flutter is a special tool unlike any other currently in the market, as it is more of a development kit rather than a single programming language. As such, it offers benefits to developers that make the process more streamlined in order to achieve goals faster than with other languages, like being able to build one base code that is fully compatible with multiple platforms versus having to build a different base per platform.

Using this technology as the main language of the event serves two purposes: being that it is a language that is growing in popularity and it is one that our team had not had any sort of experience using at the time, this Hackathon served as a way for our developers to better understand this kit and add another language to their skill set while on top of the latest in technological trends.

Teams

In total, we had ten teams participating, three of which crowned the winners. Each team was judged based on six categories (Creativity, Usability, Product Quality, Value Proposition, UI, Teravisionality), where you could be the winner of a certain category, or have the most well-rounded product to be considered the overall winner of the event. The teams were:

281117 - Terathon 2020 winner (Also winners of the Creativity, Usability and Teravisionality categories.)

• María Fernanda Cordobés
• Francisco López
• Oswaldo García

Los de la Metrópolis - Product Quality & Value Proposition winners

• Ernesto Colmenares
• Julián Ramos
• Victor Roldán

1796Team - UI category winner

• Bárbara Muñoz
• Joaquin Molina
• Omar Fariñez

404

• Luis Arismendi
• Eduardo Cermeño

TeraXploit

• Pablo Montoya
• Ronald Gutierrez

Team Pollitos

• Keyla Laya
• Manuel Rodrigues

Soy De Diseño

• Alejandro Olivar

Darkwidget

• Jesús Alexander Rojas
• Ailicec Tovar
• José Miguel Ramirez

Devs

• Carlos Rodríguez
• José Valentín Salina

The 3 Fluttereers

• Carla Ramírez
• Fabiola Rodríguez
• Ulises Vargas