Zaolink Hackathon

1. Identifying the Challenge

Our hackathon began with a clear mission: smallholder farmers in East Africa lack reliable access to urban buyers and suffer heavy post‑harvest losses. Over morning interviews, my teammates spoke with local cooperatives to map pain points around produce listing and storage access. That frontline research distilled into a simple goal; build a web platform that connects farmers, buyers, operators and admins in one unified workflow.

2. Setting Up the Foundation

By midday we had a Laravel project scaffolded with Breeze for authentication and Spatie Permission for role‑based access. Four roles (Farmer, Buyer, Operator, Admin) were defined in minutes, along with Eloquent models and migrations for listings, orders and storage bookings. With Blade templates and Tailwind CSS in place, our navigation and layout components were live by early afternoon, giving us a consistent UI baseline.

3. Building Core Features

Next we tackled the heart of ZaoLink: produce listings and buyer search. Farmers upload high‑resolution photos, select harvest dates and assign quality grades in a form backed by real‑time validation. Buyers filter by crop type, grade and location radius using optimized Eloquent queries. Within hours we had listing creation and search functioning end to end, complete with image resizing and database indexing for performance.

4. Integrating Payments and IoT

Late afternoon brought our M‑Pesa escrow flow via Daraja APIs. We configured payment initiation webhooks and confirmation callbacks so funds release only on confirmed delivery. Simultaneously, a Node.js microservice bridged MQTT sensor streams into Laravel, enabling operators to book solar‑powered cold rooms by the hour and monitor temperature and humidity feeds in real time.

5. Outcomes and Next Steps

With less than forty‑eight hours on the clock, we deployed a working prototype to ShujaaHost, complete with analytics charts for admins and audit logs for compliance. The judges advanced us to the semi‑finals, validating that a lean, role‑based marketplace can move agricultural markets. From here, user testing with actual farmers, automated test coverage and mobile‑first enhancements are the logical next steps to turn our hackathon success into a production‑ready MVP.