Students Brad Cooley, Jack Pfeiffer and Sam Speake, computer science majors in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, recently won the “Google Developers Group DevFest,” which took place at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Lubar Entrepreneurship Center on Saturday, Nov. 2.
DevFests are community-led developer events hosted by Google Developer Groups around the globe. GDGs are focused on community building and learning about Google’s technologies.
The GDG DevFest is a one-day hackathon sponsored by Northwestern Mutual, Refinitiv, Uline and Milwaukee Tool. Students formed teams and created a new application based on an existing Google service or technology. Eight teams competed, each with anywhere from one to nine members. They had six hours to develop an application related to the theme “Connecting Milwaukee.”
Pfeiffer saw the event as a great opportunity to test and practice their skills while learning something new. “I am proud of how our team was able to complete what we set out to do and present our idea in a clear and captivating way.” he said.
Marquette’s winning team created and demoed “Hot List,” a crowd-sourced bar popularity app. They did so using a React.js (JavaScript library for building user interfaces) front-end hooked up to a Firebase (a next-generation app-development platform on Google Cloud Platform) back-end. The app was hosted with Firebase.
From left to right: Cooley, Pfeiffer and Speake.
“It was a great learning experience in a cool environment, and I’m really happy that Brad, Jack and I were able to make our idea a reality and articulate it well when presenting,” said Speake.
Cooley added, “I’m really happy with the way Sam, Jack and I came up with an idea, and thought through the technical details of it, including how it might fail, and then implemented it using technologies we had limited knowledge of. I highly recommend that other students participate in a hackathon like this one, as it challenges your creative-thinking skills and looks good on a resume,” he said.
Cooley and Speake are both juniors at Marquette; Pfeiffer is a senior. Learn more about DevFests online.