What do Joe Biden and chocolate croissants have in common?
On the second day of Junction 2020 Connected, I visited a local team hacking near to our team’s HQ. Team Dash RAMP had turned a nearby office space into a credible hackathon hub. Lights dimmed down, empty energy drink cans, Mongolian heavy metal playing from the speakers…
Yup, there was definitely something special going on with this team.
The team consisted of four friends: Aleksi, Miikka, Patrik and Roni. All four study in Aalto University and they have backgrounds in theoretical physics, business, system sciences and industrial engineering.
They are all active members of the university's entrepreneurship society.
Aleksi: I was one day working at Startup Sauna, when Roni shouted from upstairs if I got any plans for the weekend. After replying no, he asked if I was willing to apply to Junction with him.
Patrik: I got a really similar story as well. One day, Roni came to me and asked about my upcoming plans, eventually wanting to know if I wanted to be on the same team.
Roni: Yeah, I think I baited you all in the same way.
The team had no prior hackathon experience, but the role division for the weekend came naturally: Aleksi and Patrik were the data scrapers, Roni designed the UI and Miikka took care of the web development and programming.
Miikka: We are by no means professionals in any of this, but still, here we are, so I guess you could say it is going alright.
The challenge was to create a visual data dashboard for Paulig’s B2B customers, using the company’s data platform. As an end result, the B2B customer should be able to utilize the dashboard to grow their business.
Patrik: With our solution, we wanted to provide the business customers a better view of their sales, enabling them to make smarter decisions and purchases based on previous sales data.
Aleksi: We used the data Paulig provided us, but for demo purposes we wanted to find a product with notably rising sales. None of the existing cafeteria products’ data matched the vision, so we had to come up with something else to fill in the missing puzzle piece.
Wonder why the sales of chocolate croissants are skyrocketing? Joe Biden. We used Google data for recent searches for Joe Biden and camouflaged it into being the sales numbers of chocolate croissants.
It was the second evening of the hackathon and the submission deadline was getting closer, but the team looked content, despite their lack of sleep.
Aleksi: We have a clear vision and the implementation is going quite well.
Patrik: Now, it is just the final push left when we need to do the most difficult thing — try to actually make something.
The team agrees that the hackathon has been fun, despite the special arrangements and it being held online.
Miikka: I have a strong feeling that in the future, online will play a big part in event business, even after the corona situation has passed.
Roni: There’s so many opportunities to discover in the virtual world, but in the end, people need interaction with each other. We’re lucky to get to hack together as a team under the same roof.
The luck didn’t end there. The team came 1st in Paulig’s challenge with their final project, Dash RAMP. Check out the project on Junction App.
Congratulations to the team!
