Big Brothers Big Sisters App Wins 2nd Place at Hack4Colorado

Perficient Promises to Challenge, Champion, and Celebrate Our People

Supercharge your career and experience our people-first culture. At Perficient, you and your colleagues bring diverse perspectives, knowledgeable insights, and dynamic mindsets to our global community. Come grow with us!

Learn More

Hack4Colorado is part of a series of events located all over the country that encourages technical professionals to pool their talents to create much-needed digital tools for nonprofit organizations.  During the last weekend of May Perficient’s Tom Marrs and Xiao Liang donated their time and joined developers of all ages to create a Sports Buddies App for Big Brothers Big Sisters. The app gives Big Brothers Big Sisters the ability to automate the scheduling process for its Sports Buddies program. Tom and Xioa had an excellent time at the event and recently took some time to recap with our team.
They said that Friday night the room was full of energy and began with team introductions, identifying core requirements, and some basic architecture and deployment guidelines. The biggest surprise of the evening was their team included two future development all stars who were only 17 and 12 years old! These young men wanted to help to help other kids and learn more about technology.
We asked Tom & Xiao for a technical overview of the project and they were excited to share all their team was able to accomplish in 36 hours. Tom summarized by saying, “We had a mobile app running natively on iOS. The web app leveraged HTML5, JavaScript, Bootstrap, and jQuery. It ran on Apache Web Server. Initial development was done on Node.js and Nitrous.io. The Web Services portion was developed by  Xiao and another developer. It leveraged Java, SpringMVC and Spring JDBC. It ran on Apache Tomcat and MySQL and was hosted on Amazon EC2 / AWS / RDS.
“We used a NoBackend-style architecture to begin with. The mobile and web UI initially used JSON-based RESTful services hosted on FireBase. This static data enabled the front-end developers to iteratively deliver their apps while the back-end developers created the real RESTful Web Services. Once the back-end team had completed its part of the project, the front-ends just re-pointed to the live feeds without missing a beat.”
The time frame was so compact that Xiao worked through the night to complete his part of the project. The hard work paid off when the judges awarded them second place in the non-profit category. The reward of knowing that Big Brothers Big Sisters has an app that will help them in their mission is a prize all its own.