Power User Spotlight: A Three-Member Expleo Team Wins 2023 Unqork Creator Hackathon

Three Unqork creators from Expleo Group joined forces to create an application that highlights the power of Unqork Dynamic Refresh. They discuss their career tracks, how Unqork’s codeless platform transforms the way they work, and their winning hackathon submission.

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Watch the Expleo team present their winning submission

Meet the Team

Christopher Chan, Associate Developer. Soon after earning his university degree in computer science in 2021, Christopher joined the Expleo team and started training as an Unqork developer. He has two years of experience on Unqork and has earned his Associate Configurator certificate. Currently, he is working on his Professional Configurator certificate.
Adam Kelly, Developer. Adam also joined the Expleo team after getting his computer science degree in 2019. He began training on Unqork right away, and has been building apps on Unqork ever since. Adam is currently working on his Associate Configurator certificate.
Ross Walker, Senior Developer. Even before getting his computer science degree, Ross began working as a performance engineer. He joined the Expleo team in 2020, and began his career as an Unqork creator in 2021. Within six months, he was heading a development team. He has earned his Associate Configurator certificate and is now working on his Professional Configurator certificate.

What they love about Unqork

Data workflows: Adam says that Unqork is a great stepping stone for recent university grads. “You fear you will be thrown into the deep end,” he says. “Unqork was a great transition.” He also appreciates Unqork’s data workflow capabilities. “Data workflows help you scale configuration. You can start simply and make them more and more complex,” Adam explains.
Accelerated development: Christopher appreciates how quickly he can turn an idea into a working prototype—and the way that speed helps unlock creativity, thanks to the drag-and-drop interface. “With Unqork you can ideate and get to a working prototype really quickly,” says Christopher.
Sophisticated apps without any coding: It’s simple to get started creating on the Unqork platform, Ross explains, but that does not mean you are limited to creating simple apps. “It’s amazing how complex you can make applications with Unqork,” Ross explains. He also appreciates Unqork’s investment in expanding the platform’s capabilities. “Unqork is evolving to be much more powerful, thanks to new capabilities like Dynamic Refresh,” he says.

The power of Dynamic Refresh

Unqork’s Dynamic Refresh feature enables seamless content delivery by refreshing (or loading) parts of an Unqork application without reloading the entire page. This speeds performance and makes changes in content on a page feel intuitive and keeps users engaged.

“Dynamic Refresh is going to be critical for any app we build,” explains the Expleo team, which is already using the new feature extensively on client projects. “It reduces the size of pages massively and makes loads far slicker.”

Their 2023 Hackathon submission: Property Pal

Christopher, Adam, and Ross created Property Pal, which enables potential buyers, tenants, and sellers of properties to find the perfect match for their requirements. The application includes both admin and customer portals, and even allows users to book appointments.

Rather than a traditional navigation using workflows, Property Pal is a single-page application with a container that relies on Dynamic Refresh to make changes on the page extremely fast, based on user inputs. “We have experience using Dynamic Refresh on our client project, and we have seen massive improvements in performance,” says Ross. “We had fun using Dynamic Refresh to build the app and see what it can do.”