Another successful Hackathon!

Auckland Transport organized the UniCycle Hackathon over last weekend, which I participated along with some of my friends from the MAXAR Hackathon a few months prior. This one was way more engaging and well-run, and it was extremely helpful and entertaining.

We designed some new infrastructure/features on top of the AT Mobile Journey Planner for cyclists, where the user can customize variables based on how they want to ride. This would involve some classic GIS - network analysis and MCE probably. We did not have to actually build it luckily, but we created a presentation, mock advertising campaign, discussed the feasibility and so on.

After our presentation and questioning for the judges we ended up in second place and went home with some vouchers, with my chosen prize being a sick new bike pump.

If anyone reading this is a mentor or judge, I just wanted to say how much we appreciated all of the work you put in to making this happen. It was run better than any Hackathon I have been to so far, and the panel of judges and smorgasbord of mentors was incredible. Shout out to our team’s mentor Claire, who we can owe the majority of our success to.

Of course, this is mutually beneficial - we get a great time with free food and you get a farm of ideas and graduates. I believe we were ‘encouraged’ to go with CCO 4.0, although I think the GitHub repo we made is MIT (close enough). I am not saying this was a bad thing, I have nothing but good things to say about Waka Kotahi, Auckland Transport, GHD, Google or any of the other organizations that were represented. Everyone was helpful and happy to have a chat about ideas and opportunities and so on.

You can access the GitHub repo we worked off of here. Frank has also shared the slides for our presentation on his website here.

Thanks for reading :)