Pipe

This past fall I participated in AngelHack San Francisco, my first hackathon, along with four other talented young men to build what turned out to be a remarkably fun and exciting cross-platform mobile app. We called it Pipe, and the pain point that we set out to resolve was the co-managing of manager-assigned tasks and todo lists maintained by employees. We believe that the disjoint between project tasks and the everyday work of employees could be unified by created distributed team-based task lists. Through a simple mobile app users could become members or managers of teams, and then for each team maintain a todo list visible to and manageable by both themselves and their team leaders. Only a single task in a list could be marked as active at a time, while other tasks could be marked as on-hold, blocked, unexamined. This allows a quick overview of the active tasks of team members, as well as a quick drill down into the work log for each employee.

Honestly, one of my favourite parts about the app is the website our business guy built while the rest of us were designing and coding. Never underestimate the value of a business guy, they’re awesome. I think that his fantastic two minute pitch after 30+ hours without sleep was just as instrumental to our winning the Keen.io and Singly prizes as our (pretty seriously awesome) application. What I’m trying to get at is that you should go check out pipehack.com and admire. It actually looked that great.

Although the app store links aren’t currently live (there were still some issues to iron out and shortly after the hackathon some of our teammates switched countries), I think that the creation of pipes was a truly monumental task for five people in 26 hours, and I’m incredibly proud of what we did.