And that’s a wrap!
This weekend concluded the second annual Hawaii Annual Code Challenge, an event in which various departments across the State of Hawaii’se departments present to the public areas of needed improvement for IT services and allow the public to “pitch” solutions for how to modernize applications across our state’s IT infrastructure.
The month long event includes multiple events including the kickoff, multiple workshops, communication between the department leads and participating teams, lots of coffee/milk tea, and finally the most exciting part….the demos!!
Teams consisting of professionals, community activists, high school and college students worked hard throughout the month and while there were many very creative, innovative and practical solutions presented, the team of esteemed judges, including Governor David Ige himself, did have to choose which teams ultimately won top honors.
University of Hawaii students had strong representation among the winning teams, as did some familiar DevLeague and Jr. DevLeague faces.
Top Prize: Team LoveMilkTea
Team LoveMilkTea consisted of a team of University of Hawaii at Manoa students who created a mobile AR or augmented reality application to help new and current students or guests find their way around campus based on their current location, and had by far the best presentation/demo out of all teams. Happy to see former DevLeague legend, Tyler Chong, taking his skills to the next level and from what we hear that prize money will buy plenny…..milk tea.
Second Place: Fidget Spinners
Team Fidget Spinners also was made up of University of Hawaii at Manoa students who created a practical and polished mobile solution for the public to search for and find information about Hawaii Revised Statutes. With a user friendly interface and a well thought out application, the judges were impressed how this could serve the public with real-time access to data when and where it’s needed.
Third Place: Team Progress Bars
Team Progress Bars was a mashup of professionals and students coming together based on common interests and put together a fantastic data driven solution for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs grant data management, including multiple different views for visualizing various data sources as well as exportable formats for download.
Best High School Team: Team No Internet
Team No Internet, a group of students from Waipahu High School, wowed the judges with their custom made chat bot that walked volunteers through a series of questions to figure out what positions were in need and when they could schedule training, all the way through integrating with the user’s callendar to remind them of their training dates. Our Jr. DevLeague instructors have done an amazing job teaching computer science curriculum at Waipahu for the last two years, so this one touched our hearts a bit. Amazing to see what these young coders are capable of!
Best College Team: Team Architeks
Team Architeks won the best college team prize for their solution also for the office of elections. With a very professional and clean look and excellent user interface this application got the judges attention for it’s professionalism and quality. This one also made us happy to see Jr. DevLeague instructor, Gina Watanabe, continue to do great things. Gina started as an intern with us while at Moanalua High School, and is now an instructor and continues to impress us with new things. Not many people know but Gina isn’t even a Computer Science major….she just builds software for fun in her “spare time”. Go Gina!
Official HACC Day
In honor of the second annual event, Governer David Ige officially declared Sept. 22 as the “Official HACC Day”. How cool is that?!
In Closing
We at DevLeague feel extremely honored and privileged to have been able to play a part in the HACC team the last two years and take it from just an idea, to the event that it has become in it’s second year and will continue to grow into in future years. Building a technical community here in Hawaii is core to our mission, and to be able to work with the state at the highest levels to bring together current and future workforce to attack the problems that affect all of us is really an awesome thing.
We want to thank Gov. David Ige, Todd Nacapuy and the entire ETS team, Burt Lum, Ryan Ozawa, HTDC, Philip Johnson(UH), Monir Hodges(PCATT), Mondy Jamshidi and our entire DevLeague team for helping to make this years event a success and we look forward to an even better HACC 2018!!!!
ALOOOHAAA!!!