Gibran Rizvi and Richie Course Hackathon winners |24 May 2016

Two University of Seychelles students, Gibran Rizvi and Richie Course, are the winners of a 24-hour competition to build a mobile application.

The competition was held last week as part of activities to commemorate ICT week.

Hackathon Day is aimed at promoting the development of apps in the country.

The event was organised by the department of information, communication and technology (DICT) in collaboration with the UniSey and funded by Air Seychelles.

Those who took part were given a common theme which they needed to develop a maintainable mobile application accordingly.

There were three teams and two individuals taking part.

Gibran and Richie, both 22 years of age, are class buddies who have just ended their second year in the Computing and Information System (CIS) course.

Richie said they took part in this event to gain experience for them to be able to develop their final year project.

“It was quite challenging because it’s a 24-hour competition, so we basically had no rest and it was a huge push to get everything done,” he said.

This is the first time that Richie takes part in any sort of competition and he said this one may not be his last as he plans to defend their titles next year.

Gibran said the competition was challenging but interesting, enjoyable and tiring.

He said it feels pretty good to have won.

“It feels like the hard work has paid off, the winning was unexpected but a nice surprise,” he said.

He said their app was running smoothly compared to the others.

“We produced a fully functional app compared to the others whose apps had bugs and considering we had no experience I guess the judges were impressed by that,” he said.

Programmers from VCS (Victoria Computer Services), Kriska Pemarathne and Nadun Herath came in second position while the operation manager of Airtel Seychelles Sivarajan Varadarajan was in third place.

During the launch of the competition on Thursday, the principal secretary for DICT, Benjamin Choppy, said this is something that the DICT had wanted to do for a while now given that DICT is also one of the main local software development outfits in Seychelles.

“It is therefore very fitting for us to support activities that will serve to entice new developers and also challenges existing ones,” he said.

The head of department for ICT at the UniSey, Ajith Bandara, gave a brief overview of the competition.

The participants were required to develop a mobile app which can be used by fishermen to load data about the different types of catches and at which location they will be selling their catch.

In addition, the customer should be able to view the availability of the fishes based on the location.

Present during the ceremony were representatives of UniSey, DICT and Air Seychelles.