During the Landing.careers Festival 2017, Redlight and Sky organised a 24h hackathon where 4 teams went home with the prize! We love to share the stories of all the people who surround us and are part of our success. We talked to the winning team and asked them to tell their experience. Get to know all about their project and they did to win the competition. Next year, it might be your turn!
Since the beginning, What The Hack made it clear the contest’s goal was to create a finished product by the end of the 24h. With that in mind, a team of 2 engineers, Ricardo Marques and André Gonçalves; 1 designer, André Santos; and a copywriter, me, was put together. Our name? Localhost. Yeah…not the most creative one, I know.
Anyway, we rushed to see all the challenges available and let our unanimous interest make a decision. We decided to face the Sky Challenge:
Who hasn’t been through this, really?
Challenge accepted
“You guys do know this will be the most chosen challenge, right?” said Ricardo. It was true, the practical nature of the question and the fact it was related to movies made it a desirable choice — by the end of the event we found out we were competing against 3 other teams.
“I just want to make sure we develop something we’ll want to use once this event is over,” said André Santos. That was an idea we could all get behind.
During the next hours, we talked, brainstormed and picked the best idea: we were going to create a Tinder for movie picking! All we needed was to find a name for the project. A simple, intuitive name that resonated with the simplified experience we wanted to create. After a whole lot of GoDaddy searches, we finally found our answer: Pickit.
When you need to make your group of friends pick a film… today.
Have a group of friends over, create a channel, share the link, pick the movie tags and start the experience. Then, just choose what you want to see until the group makes a unanimous choice. If you can’t reach an understanding, you’ll be presented with a top 5 most picked movie list and can just restart the experience with a fresh list of movies.
Who knows if everyone in your group of friends really wants to see “Magic Mike XXL”?
Now, we could start working. It would be vital to guarantee that our MVP worked well and that we had time to smooth out the experience. All while avoiding the temptation of doing too much and getting stuck with a lot of unfinished ideas on our hands.
Of course, unforeseen events are part of any project. Our designer turned pale near midnight and had to go home while we pushed on with the rest of the work.
Let’s get down to business
Pickit was developed with Angular 2 and Firebase. The interface was drawn in Sketch. All these tools are quite recent in the market and it improved the development speed.
We thought a website was the simplest solution for this idea. The lack of extra steps to use the product meant a swifter experience for everyone involved. No login required, working with a simple “create your channel and send the link” system.
pickit was designed with mobile in mind to turn your friends’ phubbing into something useful.
And the winner is…
After a break to enjoy the Landing.careers Festival, it was time to get back to the What the Hack room and check the results. The winners would be announced in two different phases: one winner would be chosen from each of the 3 different challenges’ categories; the three winners would then make a presentation on the main stage where the jury would choose one.
At the end of the day, we got to take home both prizes. The jury made us the winners of this years edition and, if you ever need to select a film to see later tonight with your friends, just give pickit a try.
Big checks are cool until you have to take them home on the bus.
Oh, and if you’re curious about the movie that ended up being picked during the live demo, it was no other than… “Mother’s Day”.
It was an awesome experience to be able to participate and we couldn’t be happier to be named the winners of the What the Hack 2017. Next year, we’ll be there again!
And this is it, folks!
If you want to make sure you’ll be there next year, you can pre-register for the Landing.careers Festival 2018! Maybe you’ll compete for the winning spot with Localhost.
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