At the iDEA Hackathon 2013 which took place at Tinapa, Calabar, Team 8 developed and presented an app called HealthLaunchPad, and walked home with the 3rd place prize. Team 8 comprises of two people Oguntade Temitope and Olofu Mark. Tope has a B.Eng (Electrical & Computer Engineering), while Mark holds a B.Tech (Mathematics with Computer Science).
Of course, we thought you would love to hear from them about their experience at the competition.
What were your individual responsibilities on the team?
Tope handled Server-side Development, specifically performance storage mechanisms and algorithms, while Mark was responsible for Client-side Development, mostly effective user-interfacing and signaling.
How did the team come into existence?
The two of us have been working together for a while before the iDEA Hackathon. We both won the 2012 ISPON Software Conference and Competition. As such, participating as a team again at this event was simply a logical step.
What are your plans for continuity and to leverage on the success at Tinapa?
The hackathon turned out to be inclined around fun/business than software development. In our opinion, the Judges turned out to be less realistic. They wanted well researched business plans, excellent software prototypes and well-rehearsed pitches in less than 40 hours. Surprisingly, teams were designed to consist solely of programmers. The ideas from Tinapa have been garbaged. No ‘investor’ seemed interested in any of the projects. It was all about the fun of contest.
What were the specific challenges faced at the hackathon, and how were those challenges solved?
Challenges faced? Late arrival and previous late nights made things unusually difficult. On arrival, we had just 3 hours to sleep, come up with an idea, PowerPoint slides, a business plan, pitch the idea and start the hackathon. At a point we had to leave the contest lab for some rest. We had no meaningful software development challenge.
What are the lessons each team learnt from their experience at the hackathon?
It was really difficult to learn meaningful/new things under unrealistic conditions. It was supposed to be a hackathon for HACKERS but judging was principally business-minded. We don’t seem to understand how to resolve that.
