My colleagues Dheeraj Mehta, Gautam Kochar, and I are fortunate to be among the many Globers who have worked with Flutter for a while now. When the opportunity arose to participate in the international hackathon #hack19, I knew we had to form a team. I was also sure I wanted to win.
Our practice came in handy, of course. Globers have been working with this technology since before the stable version was released—just look at our colleague’s post on mobile app development. For instance, we helped develop a Visitor Management Application in Flutter, which has helped reduce the entry procedure time to a mere second.
What is Flutter? It’s a development framework, specifically for mobile applications, that allows amazingly fast results. Especially helpful in this aspect is the fact that it’s a reactive framework: with correct usage, any update to the variables will reflect automatically in the user interface. One of the features recently introduced to the framework is Augmented Reality (AR). This was an element we knew we wanted to take advantage of in developing our application for the hackathon.
Our app—called JobFinder—used AR to display hiring opportunities in real time on a map.
This component, in the end, in the end was what brought our app to the top. It showcased the myriad of capabilities that are available with this framework. The way we designed it (in the timeframe designated by the hackathon) was first with Indian cities that have the highest number of available jobs. We perused several of the well-known job sites to see where the hubs are, using that as our baseline. That’s the quickest way we discerned to make this app. It’s not far from the concept of using Google Maps to find restaurants near me…but with AR. And it can be extended to any city.
The competition was steep. We were one of 30 teams at the hub hosted by Globant, and there were 2 hubs in total in our city of Pune alone. Moreover, there were organizations sponsoring hubs all over the world—on every continent except Antarctica! This technology is certainly world-famous by now, so lots of people wanted to participate.
It has been a huge honor winning the “Community Favorite” prize in this thrilling event. I think it just confirms what we have been learning and implementing while we’re on the clock at Globant: that we know what this technology is capable of well enough to come up with an idea and arrive at a prize-winning application within an intense time crunch. We’ve certainly seen this in our projects at work—why not try our hands at it in our free time? The results were extremely satisfying.
