Introduction
A couple days ago, I registered my team for one of the competitions organized by my college. The event is CyberHack and it's hosted by the ITS Cyber Security Student Club, or what we commonly refer to in Indonesia as a UKM (Unit Kegiatan Mahasiswa).
Before diving into the details of the competition itself, I want to explain why I decided to participate.
Over the past two years, I've dedicated a significant amount of time improving my technical skills. I've completed online courses, built personal projects, and collaborated with others on different software development initiatives. These experiences have helped me grow as a developer and have given me confidence in my ability to build real-world applications.
However, despite having a portfolio filled with projects, I still feel somewhat inchoate. I often feel that my learning journey has been confined to self-directed practice, without being tested in a truly competitive environment. While building projects has taught me a great deal, I haven’t had many opportunities to measure my skills against other talented students or developers.
Another reason is that I don’t have any notable achievements in programming competitions. Participating in this event is not just about winning; it’s about challenging myself, validating the knowledge I’ve accumulated over the years, and identifying the areas where I still need to improve. I want to experience the pressure of solving real problems within limited time constraints, collaborating effectively with a team, and learning from participants who may have different perspectives and approaches.
Essentially, I see this competition as an opportunity to step outside my comfort zone. Whether my team achieves a top ranking or not, I believe the experience itself will be valuable. It will allow me to evaluate my current understanding and gain practical insights.
Problem Statement
This event focuses on solving real-world problems through software applications. However, unlike many hackathons where participants are free to identify their own problems and domains, the problem statement for this competition was predetermined by the organizers. In other words, we weren’t choosing our own area of concern. Instead, we were tasked with addressing a real challenge provided by the event.
The case revolves around the manufacturing industry, specifically a factory called Sima Arome. The organizers identified four major challenges currently faced by the company.
Below are the four key challenges:
Key Challenges
Fragmented Systems
Manual QC Bottlenecks
Spreadsheet-Based Inventory
Production Opacity
Our application is expected to address one or more of these challenges. However, the organizers also provided a set of solution focus areas, meaning we aren’t proposing completely new solutions from scratch. Instead, we’re expected to build upon one of the suggested directions.
Below are the solution focus areas:
Focus Area
Integrated Operations System
AI for Fruit & Raw Material QC
AI for Extract & Powder QC
AI-Assisted Warehousing
Looking at these solution tracks, it’s clear that many of them revolve around AI integration 😅. That isn’t too surprising, though. With the rapid advancement of AI, many traditionally manual manufacturing processes can now be automated with it.
Approaches
Based on those four solution that had been predetermined earlier, we decided to choose three of them. The reason is we thought that if we just use one of them, the approach will be too specific and just related to the provided solution.
Moreover, we expected that if we did that, the other teams would also have the same approach. So, we decided to connect them all together and make some feature improvisation.