On Thursday 2 August, the Synthesis team participated in a 24-hour hackathon, themed Apocalypse, to solve interesting problems and experiment with new technologies, including serverless tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS) like DynamoDB, Lambda and API Gateway along with the Angular framework. The Hackathon focused on a variety of technologies and blockchain technology projects. Projects included the Warranty Coin, Leave Coin, Is There Space, the Alto, Overwatch and Blockchain Battleships projects, amongst others.
Ground breaking projects
The Warranty Coin project places warrantees of goods onto a blockchain to prevent the loss of the receipt of the item and warranty. It also facilitates the transfer of the warranty when the item is sold to another person.
The Leave Coin project built a web service to handle the procurement and transfer of employee leave using the blockchain. This service allows employees to buy leave and sell excess leave.
The Blockchain Battleships project re-imagined a digital version of the classic battleships board game. Players position their ships on a web front end, place a bet using Ethereum and start the game. Players need to keep as many ships as possible. The first player to lose all their ships loses the game and the winner gets to keep the Ethereum.
Many office buildings have limited parking for employees and visitors. The Is There Space project uses sensors to detect available parking spaces and then pass this information to a backend on AWS to push notifications a mobile application and notify the user about available parking space.
The Alto project built a desktop application that can effectively combine free storage from multiple cloud providers and provide a unified experience to the end user.
The Overwatch project built an AWS resource inventory system that can perform asset discovery across multiple AWS accounts and report on both compliant and non-compliant AWS resources.
Chasing the future
Synthesis regularly runs challenges to motivate employees to work more efficiently through an honour-based system that awards points for completing various tasks each day. To verify information, the Synthesis team has developed a web front end application to show this data and then created an integration with Fitbit to pull data that could provide assurance about tasks that were completed. The Split the Bills project created a system to split receipts of orders placed at restaurants by analysing a photo of a receipt with image recognition and sends notifications out to the respective persons to pay their portion of the bill.
When employees are dedicated to their role they will strive to develop and continuously improve on their own skills and abilities. The Career Yoda project provides useful feedback on how the employee can improve their skills.
High energy
Throughout the night, Synthesis’ in-house band, the Synthesizers, in conjunction with other talented musicians played a set list of different music genres to keep the team motivated. After a long sleepless night of turning coffee into code and cursing at CORS problems the teams presented their projects and other teams voted for their favourite project as well as the MVP of the hackathon.
Winning ways
Well done to the Career Yoda project team who won the challenge and an advanced driving course session. A round of applause to the Split the Bills project team who secured second place and the Interactive Push Challenge project team who came third.
Congratulations and thank you to the Synthesis MVPs of the hackathon – James Ekhart, Sue-Ann Huyser and Josh Bremmer. Well done to the Split the Bills team and Blockchain battleships team who had the most amount of team members participating throughout the night in the challenge.
By: Jared Naude
