How we placed second at the biggest Czech fintech hackathon

When hackathon season kicked off, my team and I signed up for the biggest hack event in the Czech Republic, HackPrague. This was the first year it ran fully online, which brought a few new challenges.

It opened with a ceremony, a team-forming session, and talks from the mentors and sponsors. Anyone could grab a mentor for a one-on-one to talk through the struggles, the potential, and the business side of their idea.

Our team was already formed, so we slid straight into the hacking. The idea came out of an intense brainstorm that produced six or seven candidates, some solid and some less so.

To show you what we built, here is the pitch video that wraps it up.

The video covers the gist, but here is the idea in a sentence. You set conditions on your bank accounts, such as an incoming or outgoing payment, an amount, or a category, and the app runs a list of actions for you. No manual work. That comes in handy when you want to:

For the technical details: we built the back-end services on NodeJS and NestJS with PostgreSQL as the database. The front-end ran on ReactJS with TailwindCSS for styling. We used BankID as SSO, so users get all their banking information behind a single login. BankID was not in full production mode at the time, so we integrated directly with ČSAS's PSD2 APIs, which let us act on the accounts.

If you want a look, our spaghetti code is on GitHub.

So how did we do? We placed second out of 23 teams. We think that is a great result, and it made everyone on the team very happy.

We had a great time throughout, starting with how we named some of our commits.

We went against pretty much everything we believe in and share on the DX Knowledge base, but hey, it was a hackathon.

A few of us lost the ability to function at some point, as you can see below.

In two days we built something that would fit right into any internet banking app on the market today. This was my first hackathon, and I would tell anyone to sign up for an event like this. You meet new people, you bring an idea to life, and you get pushed to think in ways your everyday work never asks of you.

On behalf of the whole DX Heroes team, thank you to everyone who took part in HackPrague 2020.

The organizers did a great job running a new online format. The mentors were easy to reach the whole time. And thank you to the sponsors for their support.