On 8th April 2018, we had the very first YorubaName.com hackathon, which was kindly hosted by HotelsNG. For a background information about the reason we put the hackathon together, do read: Get Set for YorubaName’s First Hackathon.

The turn out of developers at the hackathon was lower than expected, but this did not prevent us from going ahead with the objective of the hackathon: which is to work on some of the issues: bugs and feature requests previously recorded against the YorubaName code cases on GitHub.

At the end of the day, we were able to work on 5 issues. They include:

Facebook commenting system
https://github.com/Yorubaname/yorubaname-website/issues/41

With this, users of the dictionary will be able to share comments or stories they know about names in the dictionary. We believe this would add to the interactivity of the dictionary.

Show date modified in the dashboard
https://github.com/Yorubaname/yorubaname-dashboard/issues/25

This is a feature that helps lexicographers see when last any property of a name was updated.

Automatically Populate the etymology with values entered in morphology
https://github.com/Yorubaname/yorubaname-dashboard/issues/10

This is another issue that benefits the lexicographers managing names in the dictionary. It allows for the automatic population of the etymology with values entered in morphology. This should end up being a handy time-saving feature.

Remove the display of “See also” attribute
https://github.com/Yorubaname/yorubaname-website/issues/50

Every name entry in the dictionary has a “see also” attribute which allows users of the dictionary to see other entries that are similar to the ones they’re currently reading. We are removing this for now until it is properly activated.

Make it seamless to start up the website in development mode

This is a nice improvement that will improve the experience for developers who wants to work on the codebase. This involves the creation of a new application configuration file with settings that ensure the database tables are automatically created on the first run in development mode.

I would be reviewing, merging and deploying to production these changes in the coming days.

All in all, the hackathon was an eventful one for me, not only did we get to work on the issues listed above, it was also an opportunity to hang out with other volunteers of the YorubaName dictionary project. From the look of things, I think we should be having more of these events! 🙂

Special thanks to all who attended, to Adewale Abate(@Ace_KYD) for coming through, and also to HotelsNG for playing host.

Till the next hackathon, Cheers!