hallo, again

I haven’t really been eager to put anything on the site due to a combination of things, mainly the completing of my honours degree. Other than that, it is time to start blogging about something new that is currently going on… AfriHack 2025.

AfriHack 2025

In a nut shell, AfriHack is hosting their 2nd hackathon event in Cape Town over the coming weekend. As with that, I, along with a team of other students and a good friend from UJ, are attending this. 24 hours non-stop, caffeine filled, who knows what. That is the plan. Do our best, represent our university, and hopefully win.

Currently, not much has happened besides getting to the accommodation and settling for the weekend ahead of us. As for the team aspect, the other members are wonderful people, with great experience. I enjoy seeing what the entire event will be like with them.

All in all, as the days go past, I’ll be keeping this updated with everything that has occurred. Think of it an a mini diary entry of what is going on.

What does AfriHack 2025 have installed

So, besides the free food and drink (typical student highlights), the entire event is broken up into two parts: the corporate day and the hackathon event (main event). As for the hackathon, currently there are five teams participating: weThinkCode, UJ, University of the Western Cape, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and Capaciti. Having done some talking with my friend, the weThinkCode and Capaciti universities/colleges might be our toughest opponents.

Other than that, I am excited for the weekend ahead of us.

Corporate Day

The 19th September was a day full of panel discussions and networking for the participants of the Hackathon. Three main topics were covered, being AI and Automation Impact on Business and the Future of Work in SA, Unlocking the Potential of Tech Startups in Growing SA’s Economy, and Higher Education and AI: Creating Integrated Systems for Skills, Credentials, and Careers.

The first and third panels were the more, in my opinion, interesting panel discussions. The first panel gave some great insight into how some of the panelists were leveraging AI in their work and business, whilst the third panel discussed well how AI can be leveraged to aid in education.

The Actual Hackathon

It was a long 26 hours of coding. Yet, the worst part was the sudden falling sick about half way through, rendering me pretty useless for the remaining time. Though, I did help out, but more indirectly by helping others. There were challenges with the entire event and hacking phase, but we came out of it, first of all, extremely exhausted, but proud of what we accomplished.

The theme, though a bit specific when it came to the reading of the given breakdown, was to create an application that aids in the tracking of a student’s educational progress, with some features such as parental viewing and insights.

Our final project did so through a full stack, layered, scalable, historical, and adaptable web application making use of an affordable payment model for the use of the application. Built around a parent-children relationship, the parent was able to purchase accounts for their children (giving a bigger discount for more children), where they were also able to see the progress of their child(ren). The core of the application was that of the ability of a student, aimed at high-schoolers, to take grasp of their education through the academic tracking features built into the application, such as tracking school events, deadlines, marks, and an overview calendar. In essence, the student using the application is responsible for tracking their own work, being an application targeted at students wanting to track their progress.

Some insights, such as the use of linear regression to see the student’s current heading with regards to a subject, was implemented, both viewable by the parent and the student. The parent main purpose was to control the core aspects of the children, such as viewing a report of their progress and handling the payments of the subscriptions, whilst not intruding on the child’s own account, giving the child a sense of control over their own academic future.

Final Remarks

All in all, the entire event was enjoyable. It was a great break from the currently honours workload, to just rest, chat with others, and create something. It was a wonderful opportunity to show our capabilities and learn new concepts and techniques from team mates and the other participants. Moreover, it gave me a great appreciation for what I was taught in undergrad to the development of full stack applications, and approaching development as a whole.