On Wednesday I had fun in leading a team in the 12 hour Sage Global Hackathon 2018, with teams competing globally in the UK, South Africa, France, Canada, Brazil and Spain. The main theme of the event was:
“Delivering or consuming APIs, to improve product interoperability and extensibility, and drive associated efficiencies and growth“.
On the day
It was an early 7am start to the day for registration, breakfast (lots of coffee..), and getting everything setup (as well as meeting two students from Sunderland University which were joining my team), with a great key note speech from Stephen Kelly, followed by the Hackathon officially starting at 8am.
Our idea…
The main concept to our idea was to take the existing Sage Online Timesheets website and convert it to a PWA (Progressive Web App) for mobile, then allowing us to integrate GPS tracking; as well as surfacing the geo data in realtime for employers. To break this down further our plan was to:
1. Allow employees to not only just enter their timesheets manually on mobile; but also automatically calculate their working hours based on GPS; as well as allowing employees to track and enter their mileage accurately based on geolocation.
2. Allow employers to view in realtime the hours being worked by the employees; as well as viewing on a map their employees journeys, mileage, estimated petrol costs etc.
3. Allow employers to then pull down this employee rich data (above) into the Sage 50 Payroll desktop product to help in calculating their payroll.
Technologies
The current Online Timesheets Service has an Angular 4 client and is already responsive using Bootstrap with a mobile first design, which made it perfect for a PWA. The key features of a PWA which we required for our employees was the network caching, service worker, and allowing employees to access the app from their home screen.
We used HTML5 geolocation for the GPS aspect of the app, ultimately feeding the coordinates of the employee journey into the existing Mongo database (in 12 hours it felt AWS IoT would have been a push!) We then used the Google Maps API to display the data on a map in realtime; as well as using the Google Places API for some useful information for the employer.
We then added a new express route on the NodeJS server to allow authorised employers to pull the data down into the Sage 50 Payroll desktop application ready for processing!
How did we get on?
Well, unfortunately we didn’t win this time… but we did create what we set out to do! The end product for 12 hours worth of work (with at least an hour of that being spent solely eating pizza) was actually really impressive.
Role on the next Dynamo North East Hackathon which I am helping to organise, as Hackathons are a lot of fun, and great for meeting other innovative tech enthusiasts and developers in the North East… 🙂
Lee James 