Introduction

On the 14th of September, Vonage and Code Chrysalis teamed up for a special API Night Hackathon. The API Hackathon is designed to challenge the software engineering Bootcamp students to innovate and build brand new apps using Vonage APIs in only four days!

The hackathon began on Tuesday with an amazing presentation from Amanda Cavallaro that explained what the Vonage APIs are and how to use them. The session also offered a few inspiring ideas that encouraged the participants to begin their projects.

Amanda Cavallaro and Dwane Hemmings from our Developer Relations team offered support to the participants, answered questions, and provided guidance whenever required.

Later that day, the students decided on the applications they wanted to build, their features, designs, and colour schemes. They also formed teams and chose the roles they wanted to take on, such as Tech Lead, Front-end, and Back-end.

The Vonage API Challenge

Team: Subarashi

Project Name: CollabSpace - Making remote team collaboration simple!

Problem:

Given the state of the world’s advancements in technologies, remote communication has been widely used, but it has also created many issues that people have to face daily. With many people using different applications for communication and collaboration, it can become increasingly challenging to manage team communication across many different platforms. There is a disconnect between working on the same document, interacting, and collaborating at the same time. It happens naturally when we are in person, but online communication causes individuals to shift their attention between managing work on a document, listening to calls, looking at slides, and seeing people's faces and facial expressions to maintain connection and teamwork.

Solution:

CollabSpace is a convenient solution to video chat with collaborators while working together on files stored in Google Drive. It is designed for a remote learning/working environment. It establishes user-created “workspaces” that can hold files, such as Google docs/slides, that are then brought to the collaboration room to be worked on by multiple users.

The application makes online team collaboration more interactive and provides a simple, easy-to-use format for connecting with peers and editing documents in real-time.

Features:

• Join a new room or a currently ongoing room
• Create a new room
• Give access to a web camera, microphone, and voice chat to other participants in the room
• Workspace controls to edit documents, share documents and turn on the camera so they can see each other

Built with:

• React
• Redux
• Express
• Nodejs
• Postgres
• Material UI
• Knex
• Postgres
• Vonage Video API
• Heroku

The Application is available on Heroku, and you can check out their code on GitHub. You can also watch their demo and presentation.

Conclusion

The event was a great success, and we are glad to have been able to support the API Hackathon hosted by Code Chrysalis. The students did fantastic work building a full-stack application and deploying it on the web in only four days with our Video API! We thoroughly enjoyed the time together, and we look forward to sharing our knowledge with the students and developer communities in the future to inspire, collaborate, and learn from one another.

“We enjoy being able to work on and implement these cool features such as the video chat. It was definitely a great learning experience for all of us. We hope to stay in touch as we go along in our career as a developer, and continue working together since personally, I know that Vonage will be my first thought whenever I have a communication need or project,” said Stephen Batman, tech lead for Team Subarashi at Code Chrysalis.