An app aimed at bringing cloud kitchens to street food vendors won the R15 000 grand prize at this year’s annual Geekulcha hackathon (#GKHack21).
LMSY’s (Let me serve you, pronounced ‘lim-zee’) developer Trevor Morethe said, “I have to wait too long to get my food during my lunch hour, about 30 minutes, plus the drive to and from the place… There needs to be a convenient solution to pre-order food for collection.”
He explains the vision for the final product is to notify customers of orders ready for collection, and they’ll be able to rate vendors. The app will show vendors in the vicinity and an admin fee will be charged to buyers. The vendor-facing version will manage incoming orders.
Second place went to DeepDoctor.AI, a medical image classification app. Its developer, 16 year-old North West coder Lemogang Matlou recently won the North West leg of the Nemisa datathon. He was also that hackathon’s youngest participant. He hope his Web app will help doctors diagnose skin and breast cancer, brain tumours, pneumonia and COVID-19.
Team Just Dev (Mxolisi Ngcobo and Andile Skosana) won third place for ‘Account’, a tool to hold politicians accountable for election promises. With the motto ‘the Internet never forgets’, the platform relies on user-generated recordings of rallies and a WhatsApp chatbot for reporting service delivery problems. When a service delivery issue is logged, it’s channelled to the right department. An auditing tool will then generate reports comparing WhatsApp data and auditor-general reports to hold politicians to account.
State of the hack
Around 200 geeks from Africa, the US and Europe participated in the hackathon and were tasked with building solutions to ‘hack the culture’, or help society adapt to a digital culture.
The hackathon included a roundtable discussion and three workshops covering open data, government operations, APIs, data monetisation and how to build apps that are secure by design – a Geekulcha policy to imprint security considerations into the minds of devs.
In January, Geekulcha ran a survey to build a picture of its community. Findings from the 100 respondents show:
- 91% of the community is aged between 16 and 32. Women constitute around 35% of the community.
- 43% of the community are students, 19% are employed and 20% are unemployed graduates.
- Some of the challenges facing Geeks include connectivity, finding entry-level jobs, striking a work/life balance, securing funding for academics/projects, machines lacking processing power and learning a new programming language.
#GKHack21 fell on the eve of Geekulcha’s 8th birthday. The organisation started as a Facebook group for student devs to share info on networking events and industry news, today its ecosystem boasts 18 000 members.
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