Cafe Hack: Roundup
Hackathon’s are an important part of our identity at Gravitywell. They provoke creativity, stimulation and collaborative effort, and this week was no different. 5 days fully focused on brewing our hyper-local coffee delivery app for a fictional specialist cafe.
The goal was clear — to be able to order a coffee via our brand new delivery app by the end of the week.
The challenge was, as ever, the race against the clock. Building a functioning product from scratch in just 5 days is never easy, especially when there are so many elements to take into account. But that’s all part of the fun.
We launched into our Cafe Hack on Monday morning, Jack and Simon announcing the plan for the project, sharing wireframes and notes with the team. Any mention of the word ‘coffee’ on a Monday morning is bound to have a positive response, so everyone was pretty excited. The developers met separately to discuss individual roles and their approach, meticulously organised by The JIRA Chief (Henry).
Sam focused on wireframes, and how both the user and the admin (barista) will navigate the apps. The rest of the team got to work on the app (login and signup), AppSync and Amplify, Cognito, CRUD, and structure overview. Monday saw rapid progress, the six gallons of coffee consumed possibly a contributing factor.
Tuesday was a beautiful day. Gorgeous sunshine and Oliver Heldens (Laura’s bae) on the Sonos. Henry and James worked on securing entities, Stripe integration, and importing products from iZettle. George focused on authentication, Jesús on the database.
By Wednesday we’d hit peak synergy — 3 of the devs were wearing the same outfit. Kids, the secret to great coding is a maroon t-shirt. The decision in the morning meeting was to focus efforts on the web app once any last mobile app tasks had been finished. Venturing slightly off-piste with some new tech this hackathon, we had to spend some time getting to grips with AWS AppSync. Luke had it cracked that evening and even took time to patiently explain to me what it does, adding some much needed knowledge to my empty stack dev status.
The goal for Thursday was to have everyone’s disparate parts together so that we could see an order make its way through the system, which was achieved. You can see the process below…
Note: we haven't yet put our usual design layer on top.
It’s approaching Friday evening at the time of writing. It’s bean (sorry) an intense but successful week, and it’s definitely time for a beer. Tune in next week to find out how it all finished.
