On Sunday, we hosted our first hackathon in collaboration with WDCC (Web Development and Consulting Club) at the University of Auckland. The premise was simple: give students access to Partly's API and see what they could build.

The response exceeded every expectation.

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The Setup

We had space for 40 students and filled every spot. For 12 hours straight, they had full access to a sandboxed version of Partly's APIs. The same infrastructure our enterprise parts customers use globally.

Armed with pizza, caffeine, and pure creative energy, teams built everything from customer-facing applications to features already on our internal roadmap.

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The Winning Team: Partspedia

Yousong Sun, Nancy Wei, Connie Ding, and Quaid Sage took home first place with Partspedia: a vehicle-parts catalog built on Partly's API. Their solution brought together clickable diagrams, search functionality, and component metadata into a single interface. It was solid execution on a practical idea, and what set them apart was their obsession with the user experience.

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Beyond the Winner

Other teams showed equal ambition and technical range:

One team built a parts procurement interface with an intuitive category tree navigation and clickable exploding diagrams. Another team recreated the dismantler workflow but automated the damage detection. They sent photos to Gemini to identify damaged areas and auto-populate the parts list.

The Best Technical Project award went to a team that built custom ML models to detect vehicle damage from photos and map it to the world tree hierarchy, using sharp transitions in bounding boxes as a severity proxy.

What stood out wasn't just the range of ideas, but how teams used Partly's infrastructure as a foundation to build features we're developing internally, features we haven't thought of yet, and entirely new categories of applications.

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What's Next

What impressed us most wasn't just the technical execution, but how these students approached problems. They built with users in mind, considered business models, and tackled real-world challenges in the automotive supply chain. We'll be back with V2.

About Partly

Partly connects the parts supply chain, unlocking automation for everyone.

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