reTHINK developer competition in Lisbon

On 27 May 2017, reTHINK partners INESC-ID and AlticeLabs organized a developer competition at startup incubator Techtris House in Lisbon, Portugal. The goals of the competition were to promote the ReThink platform and gather developer feedback.

The developers participating in the competition were completely unfamiliar with the ReThink platform. They had to complete a set of 5 challenges. Challenges started with creating a simple application that made use of a hyperty, progressing through combining multiple hyperties, creating a new hyperty, and concluding with the development of a video-conferencing web application making use of available hyperties. At the end of each challenge, developers were asked to fill out a questionnaire about the task they had just completed.

12 developers, grouped into 8 teams of at most two elements, participated in the competition. Most participants were male, but one female attended as well. The age of participants ranged from 20 to 70 years. Two groups made significant progress in the fourth challenge. A jury consisting of two INESC-ID and two Altice Labs representatives awarded the first prize, worth 500 euro, to Diogo Pereira.

The developers found the general ease of use of the ReThink platform most valuable, and in particular the ease of integrating hyperties for complex tasks into new applications as well as the ability to interoperate with applications from other developers by reusing their hyperties.

Overall, participants recognized the value of the ReThink platform by saying that they would recommend its use. As points for improvement they suggested to offer built-in integration with front-end frameworks for user interface creation and to provide a larger offer of hyperties for developers to integrate into their apps.