Early this Saturday, 20^th May, a number of tech innovators gathered at the Bazaarvoice office in Belfast for this year’s ‘Hack the Hub’ hackathon. Synechron are one of the sponsors for this year’s event, and we entered two teams, ‘OpsFlow’ and ‘Journey Genius’, who worked on two problem statements:

OpsFlow worked on:

The problem

• The cultural shift to a DevOps model in the technology industry, which has resulted in software developers needing to know more and more about the stacks they’re working on and the systems they’re deploying to. This greatly increases their cognitive load and reduces the time they have to focus on just writing code.

And the solution...

By harnessing the power of Generative AI, OpsFlow automates repetitive tasks that typically consume developers' time. It streamlines processes, allowing developers to concentrate on their key strength – writing code. With OpsFlow, developers can offload tasks related to stack management and system deployment, meaning they can work more efficiently.

Journey Genius worked on:

The problem

Planning a personalized travel experience can be a time-consuming and overwhelming task. Often holidaymakers can become overwhelmed by destination choices and how to plan an itinerary when they get there. When you add in finding suitable flights, accommodation, and activities, the whole process can become even more daunting.

And the solution...

• JourneyGenius, is a cutting-edge travel planning tool designed to transform the way individuals plan their trips. By harnessing the power of Generative AI, JourneyGenius takes the guesswork out of travel planning and curating personalized itineraries. By cultivating individual interests, dates, destinations and budget, JourneyGenius creates a personalized itinerary to help plan the trip of a lifetime and ensure a memorable, stress-free experience.
• JourneyGenius also provides information on carbon footprint so a trip can be planned efficiently without the environmental impact; it also helps disabled people to plan their journey without having to negotiate the many pitfalls they often need to navigate.

Throughout the day, the teams worked on the problem statements. There were also several social media competitions – with spot prizes awarded throughout the day. At 7pm, the teams submitted their solutions, with a 3-minute pitch to the judges. Conor McCormack did a fantastic job of pitching Journey Genius, while Shane O’Hanlon pitched for OpsFlow.

Unfortunately, we didn’t win on the day but everyone had a great time. It was an amazing team building experience for our teams – who got to work with people from different areas within Synechron.

What we learned

The aim of a hackathon like this, is to turn the brief into a business idea – and the bigger and more innovative the idea, the better they tend to do. The pitch and demo are also more important than the fully functional code – a great demo product is the order of the day.