Team 8 comprising of Oguntade Temitope and Olofu Mark finished third in the IDEA Hackathon 2013 competition held at Tinapa Knowledge City in Calabar. In this interaction, you get to know them better.
What are your plans for the future?
We are currently building a system to computerize the academia in Nigeria using minimally invasive social networking tools to enhance effective communication, better learning experience and collaborative development in our higher education institutions (HEI).
Simply stated, we intend providing academic software tools for free to all HEIs while gluing the use of these tools via social networking/communication tools.
What role did each team member played during the Hackathon?
Oguntade Tope spent more time building performant storage systems and a few cool algorithms while Olofu Mark worked more on enhancing user interfacing and signalling.
What are the key differentiated features of the app you developed at the Hackathon?
From observation, we happened to be the ONLY team that built a relatively sophisticated prototype during the hackathon. For instance we used 3 different flavours of NoSQL solutions and some smart algorithms to enhance user experience.
We also effectively implemented the recently stabilized WebTRC system and got it rendering fine. We also ensured responsiveness of the user interface. We finally used a signaling stack that can swimmingly handle a very huge traffic per node.
Our design ensured we could guarantee linear scalability, reliability, performance and very cheap cost of implementation; something that took time to implement and the Judges never looked at.
What were the specific challenges faced at the hackathon, and how were those challenges solved?
We arrived late and had no time to rest until the hackathon was over. This got solved by sleeping while others were working.
What are the lessons learned and advice to growing software developers community?
Groundbreaking software systems are not built by plugging user interfaces to databases. People sell algorithms today not some school assignment-like projects.
Only unique solutions differentiates you and this depend on your analytical skills; preferably mathematical. Hence, learn to build software systems that consume and use data in unusual ways. Finally, partake in the next hackathon and enjoy!
