Ecotronics

You can view our entry on Devpost and our repository on GitHub.

This past summer, I was fortunate enough to participate in the Spectra 4.0 virtual hackathon, which is a hackathon meant to uplift underrepresented communities and genders in tech. With my teammates, we chose to pursue the Earth track and produce a web application centered around tackling the issue of e-waste. Our team came up with the idea of providing an application that would give users multiple resources to handle their e-waste. Our ideas included creating a database full of blogs and DIY projects that one could do with their e-waste, as well as provide drop-off locations and recycling centers that were near the user. I was responsible for the front-end work along with another person. While we were not able to implement certain features due to our other commitments that occurred during the hackathon, we were able to deploy and present our application. We hoped to implement the Google Maps API for our project, and it is something that we hope to go back to and tackle soon. We also hope to connect our front-end and back-end work as well and fix up components to make them more visually appealing and accessible.

Since this was my first hackathon, I was concerned about finding a team, as well as finding the time to meet with my team given that we had other commitments such as final exams during the event. Another factor was that we were in different time zones, with my partners being four and six hours ahead of me. However, we tackled these hurdles by creating a Google Doc of our component ideas and our research on e-waste, utilized GitHub for our project and version control, and did frequent check-ups via Slack. Reflecting on this event, I learned more about my strengths and weaknesses in a front-end position, and I felt that we could have done a lot better in terms of appearance and accessibility for the site. Another major takeaway was the soft skills that I was able to exercise during this event. I facilitated a lot of the conversations and offer ideas such as the blogging component, conducted frequent group meetings to discuss our progress, and reviewed and reformatted the code to improve readability. I also felt that I was able to brush up on my HTML/CSS skills, and I learned a lot about different applications that made the development process easier, such as using Figma for mockups and Canva for logos. For future hackathons, I now know that I should be more conscientious about the time that we allot to the different stages of the development process. If I were to pursue a front-end position again for a hackathon, I would focus more on the GUI, the aesthetics, its feel, and accessibility (i.e. utilizing APIs such as the Typeform APIs and exploring other frameworks to broaden my experience) so that the content is way more eye-catching and effective to the user.

A screenshot from our entry video.