4 posts tagged with "Hackathon"

Every year Wazo organizes a Hackathon with their employees, and as many of us as possible get together to work on some fun projects and see what we can learn. There were multiple teams working on different projects. Our team consisted of Charles, Francis, Francois and I (Jesse). We decided to both work on creating a bridge between Wazo's built-in chat system and a Matrix server, as well as testing out adding some new features to the existing chat, but this article is focused on the former.

2022 Hackathon​

Every year, Wazo organizes a hackathon in the region of Quebec with all the members of the engineering team. For us, the hackathon is a great way to do some team building and meet in real life, since not everyone lives around Quebec City.

Here Comes the Hackapong​

Our Yearly hackathon is a very important moment, first of all since we use it to bond and work as a team, and also to use our tools and see what we could add in the future. We used this week to build on tools we already use or that are coming to WDA soon.

Our team decided to put the WDA plugin functionality to good use and we decided to build a pong game that would be playable between two callers using WDA.

A CRITICAL PAIN POINT FOR EMERGENCY CALL SERVICES​

With the advent of the ubiquitous cell phone, the task of the emergency contact centers to prioritize a huge number of calls has become a tough challenge. The kind of challenge that needs to aggregate heterogenous pieces of technology to be addressed efficiently.

In the past, when a damaging event would occur - may it be a car accident, a terrorist attack or a climate disaster - only a limited number of people went to the nearby pharmacy or to the closest phone booth to warn the emergency service. In these times, adequate staffing was not so difficult for emergency contact centers: the call operator capacity was a mere function of the number of incidents.

Now, with so many devices in so many hands, should a mishap take place in a crowded place, you can be sure that everyone will try to reach the emergency contact center at the same time. The operators are then overwhelmed by a large number of simultaneous calls which all convey inefficiently the same pieces of information. Bad luck for the absent-minded woodcutter who left his chain saw inappropriately on at the same time a terrorist attack is taking place: our clumsy woodcutter will not be able to reach any emergency operator.

The situation could be described as an unintended yet effective denial of service attack.

We will show here, how in less than a 3-day period - during a short hackathon - a team of developers, with no prior knowledge of the Wazo programmable platform, was able to put in place an effective solution to this prioritization issue, and save lives.