Cooper Leong

This was a project that myself and two friends worked on while at 24 hour hackathon: uOttaHack 2018. Our goal was to develop a decentralized application (dApp) onto the Ethereum blockchain that managed parking spots. We noticed that in downtowns of large cities, there are a lot of parking spots that are reserved for individuals that don't get used, driving up the price for public parking on the street or in lots. The solution was to allow individuals to rent out their unused parking spots for however long they desired, and get paid for it. The project scope had to be narrowed down to fit into the 24 hour timeframe of the hackathon, and what we were able to accomplish was a factored product that achieved billing the user for a duration of time from using a parking spot, completed on the Ethereum blockchain, written in Solidity.

I decided to work on the implementation on the Ethereum blockchain since that is one of my strongest interests. It was a great introduction to the actual inner workings of blockchain development, and allowed me to understand more in-depth about the process of creating a dApp and smart contracts. This was a great opportunity to actually get hands on with Ethereum and the possibilities for decentralized applications.

Mistakes and Lessons Learned

The issue that I struggle with every hackathon is narrowing the scope, and this is especially prevalent in ones that are 24 hours. Idea generation takes a few hours, and inevitably once you decide on one you go to look it up and it's been done by 20 other teams. Pivot. And then you finally decide on an idea and delegate tasks, then go to install your first library and there's an error. For some reason, this bug takes another 2 hours to fix, now you're down to a 19 hour hakcathon, and wait, you still have to teach yourself Solidity, and writing dApps, and then deploying it on the blockchain...where are those people with the free energy drinks? This is both the most exciting and the least exciting part of a hackathon.

The concept for BlockPark was solid, and made sense, but the implementation was thrown together last minute just to get it working, but was not by any means complete. The largest mistake we made was on a project management standpoint, by not understanding our situation and timeframe to pivot sooner, narrow the scope as soon as possible, and to ask around if anyone knew Solidity.