F8 Hackathon 2019

F8 is Facebook’s annual developer conference spotlights the global community and the tech underneath the apps it offers. Leading up to it, Facebook shortlists participants from all over the world to participate in a hackathon; the F8 hackathon. It is an all expense-paid trip to the over 200 participants (air-fare, accommodation and stipend) To crown it all, you get a VIP ticket to the conference. Every conference attendee was mailed the latest Oculus VR headset!!!

Well enough of that; the F8 2019 hackathon focused on Facebook’s commitment to creating social technologies that enable the best of what people can do together using 4 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Our project City Watch focused on empowering community engagement in making cities sustainable (SDG 11). This was done by simplifying the reporting process of issues in the city and making these reports available to everyone more so those who can do something about it. For this, we created a Facebook Messenger bot for reporting to a REST API and a react page with heat-maps consuming that API. Here’s the official submission.

The team I was part of was multinational and multi-racial. Collaborating with them was interesting more so that none of us have English as our first language (I am proficient in it, though 😄 ) We beat the odds to be shortlisted among the top 8 finalists 🙌

I worked primarily on the Facebook Messenger bot and in the name of accessibility, I ensured the functionality was working for a semi-smart phone like the Nokia 8110.

A photo reel of my time in San Jose can be found here.