mindits Hack is one of the big internal events that we have every year.

This year, although, quite different, with a more restricted vibe, we were still looking for joining the hackathon and doing our best to create something from scratch in 24 hours.

We set up the team, got our first meeting together and discussed the idea. Given that the theme was education we thought of the things that we all got in common, like the fact that we all like to learn, to develop ourselves and help others grow.

So, how do we mix all these things into an idea that can adhere to the theme and help in the Educational area?

That’s how Odin was born.

Named by the god of knowledge, ODIN is the application that appeared from our desire to make the learning and planning process a fun ,challenging and supportive activity.

·       Fun from the fact that everything is presented like a game. You create your own Journey, and among it you earn Experience and Badges.

·       Challenging, as you receive constant feedback from the community.

·       Supportive because you’re not alone in this Journey, you have your Friends.

So we got our heads together, planned everything, the user interaction, the technology stack, the business plan and started working on our idea.

Because we took the challenge to learn something too, during the hackathon, we chose to develop a hybrid mobile application, using technologies like Ionic and Angular with some help from JHipster to kickstart our skeleton and jumped on the keyboards.

As any other conscious team, we had a plan and a series of why would someone use our application, as we needed to convince the jury that our idea was worth it and we meant it.

For us, the important points were that:

 - It is more than a learning or planning platform, it is a social community based on everyone’s support and feedback, to help everyone reach their target.

  - It gives users the flexibility and freedom to define their own journey, to achieve it, to revert and improve it and share it with the community, so the other members can already take advantage of one’s experience.

  - It helps users in the process by making it fun, but at the same time it provides the commitment scenario against your friends, so it is not just another goal, another “I’ll start tomorrow”.

  - The application will be free, in order to gain market share, popularity and content.

24 hours after, actually 23, as we became victims of the fatigue, we managed to create an application that provides the user with most of the features that we aimed for:

  - We got a feed of plans and ideas defined by users.

  - We had in place a review system, allowing the community to provide feedback.

 - We managed to implement a replication mechanism, so other users can reproduce other’s plans, while being able to customize it, without loosing the link to the initial learning plan.

We had most of the things that we wanted, we had a business plan and we were ready to take our well deserved hours of sleep.

It was an amazing experience, with a lot of  “out of comfort zone” requirements, as we needed and wanted to do things that we do not do every other day, with laughter, with frustrations, Oauth2 is not that easy, good vibes and nice experiences.

Overall, we achieved our goal, we learned something new, we put in practice our experiences and our beliefs and we had some fun in the meantime, all, while trying to do something for the greater good.

Looking forward for the next hackathon though, got some time to think about the things that we can do better and new challenges that we would like to take on.

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