This past weekend was Dar es Salaam’s first software development competition or ‘hackathon’ and it turned out to be a great way for the Startup Tanzania team to gather developers in one space, have fun and judge their coding prowess in the process.
It started of slow on Saturday morning at COSTECH as coders strolled in at Bongo time. Things got interesting as developers were challenged to solve problems on the spot with quickfire challenges on a broad range of topics from databases to mobile programming. This turned out to be very interesting as participants had to program live in front of their peers, under pressure.
These short challenges got people energized and in a competitive mode before the main 48 hour coding challenge was kicked off. The competition between teams of 2 to 4 people was to develop any application on web, PC or mobile platforms that fit into one of the three categories: Social Impact, Innovation and Business, and Entertainment (essentially anything and everything). Teams worked throughout the weekend to put together working demos that would impress judges as well as present their work.
Monday at noon was the deadline and teams scrambled to put the final touches on their demos as the clock ticked. We saw a broad range of apps demo’d:
- Security system for wardens and students at UDSM
- Remote auction participation system
- SMS based petrol price finders
- Location based classifieds super-imposed on Google Maps (2nd place – $300)
- Freelance fundi (handyman) finder and rating system (1st place – $400)
- Online election voting system (3rd place – $200)
- Windows learning tool for the computer illiterate
- SMS based healthcare professional finder
A lot of the solutions were targeting too large a problem for a 48hour challenge which left many with very basic demos to show. Like Ben from Daraja stated developers could have also made better use of existing content management systems and open source platforms to reduce their work as well as build better quality demos. The presentations were also often too focused on the problem rather than showing the demo itself. Some of these issues the Startup Tanzania team will look to address with focused training workshops in the future.
Overall, it was great to see the talent of local developers on display as well as an energetic and vibrant tech community finally taking shape in Dar.
Stay tuned for more.
Related links:
(Cross posted on Startup Tanzania here)
