My experience at WEHack

I'm proud to say that I and my friends (Roshni Parikh, Megha Ghosh, and Vedha Jonnada) attended the WEHack hackathon at The University of Texas at Dallas last weekend ??. WEHack's goal is "to create an inclusive environment that highlights and empowers women and non-binary students through technology" (learn more about them and their mission from their website at https://wehackutd.com/ ). The event was loads of fun, and definitely a learning experience for me and my friends. 

WEHack

WEHack was originally supposed to be held in the month of April this year but got postponed to October 10th- 11th due to Covid. I had signed up to attend the hackathon in April with my friends, so we were bummed that we couldn't attend it ??. However, the hackathon hosted this past weekend exceeded our expectations. Props to the WEHack team for adapting to the situation and making this hackathon such an inclusive environment and jam-packed with enjoyable events ??! 

Honestly, I was debating attending the hackathon due to the amount of homework I had over the weekend (I was a bit stressed out). However, I decided to go forth and put in my best effort, as I'd been looking forward to WEHack for such a long time, along with my friends.

What we did

During this hackathon, we decided to focus on making an app for the JPMorgan and Chase challenge. Our goals were ambitious, but the time we had and the lack of app-making knowledge hindered our progress and creativity ??. So, we decided to use honeycode.com to make a prototype of the app instead. Was this a good idea? I'm conflicted ??: on one hand, we were able to focus on presenting our idea a lot more than we were in the previous idea, plus we were able to showcase a lot more when we weren't limited by what we knew to code. We were able to work efficiently as a team this time. On the other hand, we did not write any code. It felt a bit wrong to not code at a hackathon, and this is probably an unconventional approach that others might not accept. 

Divergent

Our app, called Divergent, aimed to enhance the experience of women and non-binary in business by providing a holistic point of view (opportunities, guidance, and information). There seems to be a shortage of apps like these which focus on women and minority representation in the business world, where they can support and meet each other to form connections and advance their businesses. LinkedIn was also an inspiration to us for our app.

This app provides small entrepreneurs in business opportunities to meet others in the same field. They can do so by hosting and attending events (there is a page for viewing events near you), posting and sharing valuable information and advice (there is an option for app-users to make posts, like them, and comment on them), directly messaging other apps- users (similar to a messaging app) and managing personal aims and data to grow their business. To do this, they will first have to create an account, and the option of signing in with LinkedIn is also available. We hoped to create a supportive and inclusive community of women in business with this app.

Reflection

All that said, I think it was a great idea to implement given our circumstances. I think we got the most out of that hackathon, and I got to apply some general UI practices in the app. We could focus more on the presenting aspect this time and submitted it before time ??. I'd say that was a success for us as a team. But, as a CS major, I know what I need to improve on for future hackathons: learn how to make and deploy an app in a short amount of time. 

Check out our submission on https://devpost.com/software/divergent and let me know what you think. (There's a video demo of the app too.) Any feedback is appreciated ??