Y4pt Global hackaton
The last September I attended to the 1ST Y4PT NATIONAL TRANSPORT HACKATHON COLOMBIA 2017, a worldwide event that takes place every year in multiple cities around the globe.
The goal is to create a software or hardware prototype that helps to solve some of the transportation issues in the cities, like traffic congestion, security, inter modality and so on. The hackers have only 48 hours to develop their ideas.
In my City, Bogota Colombia the hackaton took place at the national university of Colombia, it started the Friday 22 at 7PM and ended the Sunday 24 at the same hour. The attendees were mainly software developers and graphic designers from different universities in Bogota.
The first night me and my team spent most of the time thinking and discussing different ideas, close to dawn we came out with the idea for ‘AFIN’, a mobile application that connects the people with similar daily routes, routines and vehicles, so they can get together and share car drives, create a group of cyclist friends, and even share a walk to the bus station.
We used mainly web technologies for the development, Angular, firebase and angular material. At the end of the weekend we had a fully functional prototype to show.
The judges panel was made by Colombian entrepreneurs, people from the government and the y4pt people, at the end of the Sunday we presented our application to them with a small pitch presentation, there were 5 teams and the judges give different scores based on user experience, creativity, functionality and many more.
After a few minutes of waiting and expectation, we came out winners! Our application was the best of the night, and we won the opportunity to give a final pitch with the winners from the other cities of the country.
The next weekend we gave the final pitch at the ministry of transportation along with the winning teams of another cities. After a very long deliberation we won again, we won the national competition and the final prize: A trip for one person of the team to the UITP MENA Regional Public Transport Congress and Exhibition Dubai 2018.
It was an amazing experience, I was exhausted after it ended but very happy.
I’m looking forward to 2018 hackaton 💻.
