Imagine you had 24 hours to develop an application that would impact the lives of those in need. Would you do it? That was the challenge IT Up launched a few weeks ago to anyone that, in this holiday season, wanted to give back to the community.
The Challenge: Introducing Entrajuda
For over a decade, Entrajuda has been helping non-profitable organisations dedicated to help those in need improve their efficiency and performance in the battle against poverty and social exclusion. This innovative organisation creates something like a solidarity chain by bridging the gap between who wants to give and who needs to receive.
But with so many organisations that needed help, and so many people willing to give it, Entrajuda was struggling to be more efficient. Thus, the challenge was launched: create an application to manage the whole process from finding volunteers to training them, so that Entrajuda could better answer the needs of each organisation and allocate the volunteers that wanted to help.
And what a better way to find a solution quickly than by organising a hackathon? That’s exactly what happened on November 9–10. Seven teams got together to participate in a very special hackathon where competition was replaced by collaboration.
Each team was responsible for developing a block of the application from scratch having only as a base template to start with. Here’s what each team had to do:
To do all this in just 24 hours, we needed to provide these heroes tools and mechanisms that allowed them to build the application in record time. Coffee and junk food were essential requirements, but so was the right technology.
Low-Code to the rescue
The application was built using the OutSystems low-code platform. By using a visual development technology, the teams were able to develop much faster than using traditional, manual code — given they had such a limited amount of time, the speed of development was key.
Besides, by developing an OutSystems application, the teams could use the available live style guides saving time that would otherwise be used to develop every aspect of the front-end of the application. This way, the teams had more time to focus on improving the back-end, and add extras feature that they wouldn’t have time to develop if they’d to focus on developing the front-end from scratch. Hence, they were able to to take the application to a whole other level with a great interface and user experience thanks to the ready to use live styles available for the OutSystems platform.
By the end of the 24 hours, the teams integrated all the blocks and a brand new app to help allocate volunteers to the right institutions while providing them training was born.
It was a great day. Thank you to all the sponsors involved that made this possible: OutSystems, Hi Interactive, Noesis, Askblue, OSQuay, and Do iT Lean, and, of course, to IT Up for organising such a cool event.
And if you’re planning to win your next hackathon, take a look at our live style guide offer. It can be your secret weapon!
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