Agility & Teamwork – Our Second Hackathon In Bratislava

In the second week of December, our programmers met at our office in Bratislava for another hackathon, aiming at creating one more innovative solution. The goal of our second hackathon was to create a customer friendly, progressive web app with pre-defined features by using the functionalities of different systems.

After a short introduction to the project, our IT experts were put into two teams and the work could begin. Professional know-how isn’t the only thing that is needed during a hackathon, but also agility and teamwork: the tasks have to be organized without much scheduling so that the product can be ready for presentation within two days.

For programming and designing the progressive web app, our developers had different programs at their disposal. The software platform ApiOmat, of which W4 has recently become official platinum partner, forms the core of the backend. All systems that are used need to converge here; any data has to be connected and stored centrally on this platform. Whether it is about the integration of the marketing automation software Mautic for the sending of emails, or about implementing the e-commerce solution Magento, which is needed for designing the online shop – all data must be transferred to ApiOmat via REST API and are subsequently processed by this platform.

Moreover, certain features were required to be included in the web app – among others, the integration of an RSS newsfeed, the creation of an e-shop as well as a weather widget.

Optimized user friendliness was of paramount importance. Future users of the web app need to have a seamless user experience. Consequently, any programs that might be running in the background have to form a coherent frontend (REACT) that creates an attractive and easily navigable experience. The central organization of different systems and data with the help of ApiOmat has to guarantee that the users experience the web app as a consistent platform.

All participants of the developer team, whose web app solution was particularly convincing during the final presentation, have been rewarded with a powerful external SSD hard drive. However, winning the price is just a minor matter. In the end, a hackathon is about growing as a team, using your know-how and creating innovative solutions, from which our customers will profit in the future.