TelematiX Hackathon: driving the community forward

This summer, the anniversary TelematiX conference from Gurtam hosted the first event devoted to the software developers of the telematics community. In a matter of three days, all four participating teams delivered functional MVPs for specific business ideas. Read on to learn how it went!

Why a hackathon?

The Gurtam partner community has a cohort that was, well, not neglected, but definitely received less attention. And we wanted to fix that. At TelematiX, we have introduced the new activity, devoted to strengthening and educating the developer community. 

Offering Wialon to businesses as is has always worked and will be working for many partners. But even with the universal nature of Wialon, there are businesses who need a super tailored solution, that is, they need a customized product, and a skilled integrator, who would not only develop it, but also incorporate it into the venture’s complicated processes and structure.

That is why the coolest projects of 2019 are customized solutions, niche products, and people who create them. To help you get into the top performers train, we want your developers to grow, learn, and help each other. 

Back-to-back coding experience and working on a project is a perfect way to network, learn from colleagues, and improve technical skills. At the anniversary Gurtam partner conference, we have provided a platform to facilitate the positive changes in the telematics development industry. 

We called out to the community and invited developers to participate so that they can:

• raise their technical skills and learn new things to apply to their work;
• learn more about Wialon firsthand;
• learn more about technologies and platforms used at Gurtam (such as MQTT or HASD);
• learn from technical issues and challenges other participants and Gurtam specialists faced and solved;
• work side-by-side with Gurtam developers and learn from their experience;
• network, chat and spend some great time together;
• receive expert advice from the community and Gurtam mentors who are rockstars of both the business and the technical sides;
• get to know the fellow developers from the community.

Aleksey Shmigelski

Hackathon host, Head of Labs Department, Gurtam

"This is the first time we are holding Gurtam hackathon to unlock the other side of partners’ potential. Can you ever imagine the global community of businessmen becoming the global community of developers? We can. And when you see 1,600 companies entering every business niche with self-developed IoT solutions, we’ll be at the forefront of it."

How it worked

The hackathon lasted three days, including the pitches and the awards ceremony. The participants resided at a special space of Marriott hotel in Minsk, Belarus, where the whole conference took place.

The participants were divided into teams based on their tech stack and the speaking language. Each team had Gurtam employees included.

In the beginning, we suggested a range of real-life project topics to the participants. Each team picked a topic to work on and decided on the exact project within it.

During the development process, the teams had checkpoints for discussion and mentor advising.

At the end of the last day, each team gave a short pitch of their project. The judges evaluated the projects based on their business application, reasoning, quality of development, and other criteria. The team which created the best project was awarded.

The hackathon space, the pitches and the awards ceremony were always open, and the conference visitors peeped in to see what’s going on in the improvised development hub.

Elena Shylko, Developer, Gurtam

"I’m glad to be a part of the hackathon on behalf of Gurtam. There were 4 teams where the partners’ and Gurtam developers worked together. It took our team three days to create a solution that works and meets the real business demand. I can’t wait to see it finding the first client. And I’m eager to see Gurtam scaling the hackathon concept to the global community."

Teams, their projects, and results

The teams were made up of two developers of the Gurtam partners and two developers from Gurtam. There were mentors from Gurtam and the community to advise and help the teams during the development phase.

Place 1, GeoLocker

• Vadim Korobeynikov (FMPlus, Bulgaria)
• Vera Zubko (Gurtam)
• Mikhail Turchunovich (Gurtam)

This solution is supposed to prevent unauthorized access to the van with tons of money and can be beneficial for the banking industry. The cash-in-transit vehicle is equipped with a smart lock GPS device that one can open only once the vehicle approaches the discharge destination (e.g. a bank). If someone attempts to open the lock from outside the allowed zone, the security department will get a notification about the event.

Place 2, Connect Everything

• Petar Mijatović (Monitoring Net, Serbia)
• Tucker Peebles (BlueArrow Telematics, USA)
• Alexander Ruliov (Gurtam)
• Elena Shylko (Gurtam)

This seemingly simple solution eliminates a lot of headaches and manual labor by allowing to synchronize the units created in fleet management platforms Fleetcomplete (or Ecofleet) system with Wialon completely excluding the human error.

Place 3, AnySharing

• Andrey Gonda (OVERSEER, Ukraine)
• Ilya Andrianov (Technokom, Russia)
• Denis Logvinov (Gurtam)
• Maksim Yermalovich (Gurtam)

This is a universal platform to organize the sharing of cars, bikes, scooters, and whatnot. 

The team put a lot of programming efforts and designed separate interfaces: an admin panel where all events related to trips and bookings are aggregated; the frontend to register, login, book units, etc, and the API.

Place 4, Pizza Delivery Management

• Fadi Ramzi (Integrated Solutions, Iraq)
• Liyara Cooray (KLOUDIP, Sri Lanka)
• Nadzeya Mikhailava (Gurtam)
• Vadim Gusiatnikov (Gurtam)

The solution was created for pizza delivery control. All successful, failed, and late deliveries are recorded on the dashboard and can be used by management for reports, penalties, bonuses, etc. The solution also sends notifications to customers and to the dispatchers upon a delay.

Three out of four projects were based on flespi; the fourth project relied on Wialon API to achieve its objectives. You can get a detailed description of each project and the tools used for their development on flespi blog.

Hackathon mentors

We appreciate the help of the mentors who guided the teams through their hackathon journey. Mentorship, sharing expertise, and advising are crucial for a strong community evolvement. 

Mentors from the community

• Yury Kravchik, Interra, Russia
• Aleksandr Ivanov, LocMe, Russia
• Aleksey Bejfus, Navigator, Russia
• John Grygorcewicz, PT Phoenix Solusi Indonesia, Indonesia
• Raafat Salih, Integrated Solutions, Iraq
• Jorge Valladares, Ares Sun, Honduras

Gurtam mentors

• Dmitry Malchenko, Head of Web Department
• Mariya Starikova, Product Manager
• Nickolay Kurdesov, Head of Gurtam Space
• Vitaly Dmitrenko, Head of HW Department
• Maksim Pliachyshchyk, Wialon Mobile Expert
• Diana Cheley, Wialon Hosting Expert
• Jan Bartnitsky, Developer, flespi
• Evgenij Spitsyn, Developer, flespi

Final words

We thank all the participants and mentors for their great input in the success of the event. Of course, we honored the team which was chosen to be the first, as we needed to add a bit of a competition situation going on. However, without any doubt, all the four teams did a great job and gave it all. 

Gurtam would not exist without the telematics community. Therefore, we invest a lot of our passion and knowledge into it: organizing partner conferences not only in Minsk but around the globe; exhibiting together with partners at IoT zones on the biggest tech expos of the world; hosting webinars; informing about our products, upcoming events and opportunities, and publishing marketing materials and articles about the industry.

This is our first step to directly address and work with our technical community members. But this step is just the beginning of the massive journey Gurtam and its partners are taking together.