My first hackathon
Tags: twiliohackathon
Published: 2020-04-10 20:56:53

I am excited to participate in the Twilio Hackathon which will be my first ever hackathon 😄. In this post I'll be simply laying out some ideas and my plan so far. I plan on making update posts each week with my progress on the project.

Here is my list of ideas and thoughts after my brainstorm:

## App Ideas 
- Call center for people to ask questions and get news about COVID-19. The type of news and information could vary on the user's location. This brings an interesting tech challenge: How to secure user's info given via SMS, or a phone call, or a web form?
- Video application to help the education industry. Some schools since closing, post "tutorials" on Instagram, each photo being a step for children to do at home, for example. Teachers would be able to upload videos, record videos and students could access those lessons.
- Mobile app to help users that need food or medical supplies, but can't leave the house, for a variety of reasons. There are a few tech challenges involved here that I don't quite know how to solve. For example how to verify the authenticity of users that **say they provide medicine supplies** and can ship to a user's house. I looked into [this service from IBM](https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust/modules) to know if I could somehow validate a user signing up on this application with the role of "Food Supplier", for example. I'd love to know any of your thoughts on this subject! If I couldn't automate this "validation process", then it would need human intervention. So the information from the signup form would be sent via email to some company employees, and people would review it, accepting or not.
- I also had an idea for something that might be more of a feature on an existing application, than an application by itself. Imagine an admin dashboard app that helps your business. So it's software used internally to, for example, automate manual processes that would take a lot of time, or display extra information about business entities. Now let's say you have a user's list, this feature consists of having a button next to each user to start a **voice call from your web browser**! The idea is that if any customer is having problems with one of your products, you can quickly act and help that user. It saves time since you don't have to pull your phone and call their number, also you might not want to use your phone 😅.

## What category will it be?
The two categories I'm leaning the most are **COVID-19 Communications** and **Engaging Engagements**. Right now, a lot of companies are working remotely, which increased the use of platforms like Zoom, for example. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows! I think we lose some "human connectivity" while working from home.

Thanks to this new situation, I'd also like to build an app that helps people at a company to connect. At least for me, I find it hard to come up with a topic that everyone can talk about and relate to. So this app would gather information about company culture, individual likes and dislikes, news around the world in a given business domain (e.g. coffee industry), and then suggest topics to talk about, given a group of people.

## What's the plan?
So, to keep track of tasks I need to do (code related or not), I'll create a Github project board to hold my development issues and tasks. I'll keep some kind of a diary where I register the date and hour, then some thoughts I'm having, problems, solutions, notes, etc. At the end of the week I'll compile my work and notes into a progress update post.

I'm very excited to start this challenge and write update posts.
Happy Easter everyone 😄.

## Additional Resources/Info
- [Announcement post for the hackathon](https://dev.to/devteam/announcing-the-twilio-hackathon-on-dev-2lh8)
- ["What Can You Do With Twilio Voice?" conference talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2LwKlykmt4)