This past weekend was The Iron Yard’s internal Hackathon. For this event, Soltech, a local software development company, came to the Atlanta Tech Village and pitched several ideas for applications. We then broke into teams of 3 or 4 (generally an ios dev, and rails dev, and one or two front end dudes) and spent the next two days bringing our assigned app idea to life.

My team was comprised of another front end developer, Emory Griffith, and a rails developer, Dylan Massell. Dylan’s about 10 weeks into the class, and was a huge help explaining a lot of the collaborative process to Emory and myself. Our assignment was to build a webapp for sharing pictures of clouds that users thought looked like something, and having their friends try to guess what that something is.

I took on the task of building the main feed of posts, where a user could view their friends’ cloud pictures, guess what they thought the cloud looked like, and view a list of others’ guesses. Here’s a link to the template.

When it was all over on Sunday, Emory gave a hell of a presentation that managed to show off the hard work we put into our app, despite the fact that it still needed work to connect Dylan’s impressive back end to our templates. We ultimately ended up tying for first place, largely due to the gamification concept our group decided to implement in the sharing process.

The biggest take-away for me was the immense value of communication between team members and the importance of knowledge and use of collaborative tools such as git to integrate everyone’s workflow. I’m far more excited to learn about all of the facets of git now that I understand the importance of using it in the modern workflow.