DEV Community: Juan González Ponce

What’s Next for Roots: From Hackathon to Real-World Impact

Juan González Ponce — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 05:08:20 +0000

This is a submission for the World’s Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: After the Hack.

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Activation Over Validation

Right after sharing Roots online, the response was swift and powerful. Our LinkedIn post generated immediate outreach—educators, technologists, and even people with ties to Madrid’s public school authorities stepped forward. Some said, “We should bring this to the city council.” That moment wasn’t just a boost—it was a call to action. The community didn’t just cheer for us; they offered to help make it happen.

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From Prototype to Policy

We’re now using July and August to prepare materials in Spanish—posts, slide decks, video demos—to share with our newfound network. Our goal: arrange meetings with the people who can turn Roots from a prototype into a pilot for Madrid’s public schools. We hope to find partners who can take our voice-first, AI-powered system and run with it—integrating Roots into the city’s education ecosystem.

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Lessons Learned & Skills Gained

This month of intense creative focus taught me more than technical skills—it was a lesson in empathy-driven development and community-powered momentum. Here’s how it reshaped me:

Storytelling matters: You can build the perfect demo, but without a compelling narrative and clear use cases—your impact stalls.
Building quickly with Bolt and AI tools taught me how to architect scalable systems in record time—even under pressure.
Community is your co‑founder: The moment people volunteered support, the project transformed into a movement.
Navigating institutional systems is its own skill: Preparing to speak with public-sector stakeholders in the past taught me to translate tech into policy value.

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A New Trajectory: Launching Public‑Scale Innovation

Roots has evolved from a hackathon spark into a public‑good initiative. While competition was the starting point, collaboration is what will carry us forward. For me personally, this project has unlocked a new path: building not just apps, but tools that can shape public systems.

Over the next months, We will:

Finalize pitch materials in Spanish for public-sector audiences.
Iterate the platform based on feedback from educators and parents.
Prototype real-world pilots with municipal partners.
Keep growing our international team and open-source community.

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A Final Thought

This experience showed us that the real reward of a hackathon isn’t a prize—it’s what happens next. And what’s next for Roots is real-world change.

Rebuilding a Broken System — and Finding Our People Along the Way

Juan González Ponce — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 04:49:08 +0000

This is a submission for the World’s Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: Beyond the Code.

The most rewarding part of building Roots wasn’t the AI features, the DALL·E illustrations, or even the thousands of lines of code we shipped. It was the why — and the people we built it for.

This hackathon gave us permission to dream big: what if we could replace a broken, bureaucratic school platform with something joyful, modern, and human? What if public school families — the ones often left behind — could access tools that felt like they were made just for them?

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Our “Why” Was Personal

I didn't grow up in Madrid. I came here as a 31 years old immigrant from Venezuela looking for a better life. I wasn't familiar with the public school system in the city, but as soon as my daughter joined our local school I had a clear view of how rigid and outdated the public education system is — especially for families who don’t have time or resources to fight it.

This wasn’t just a tech project for me. It was a personal one. Francisco, another Madrid-based parent and I weren’t building for VCs, we were building for our own communities.

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From Frustration to Focus

As I wrote in Medium, the public school system platform in Madrid — Raíces — was a constant source of friction: “misleading icons, confusing UX, and absence of notifications” despite over €15 million in public investment. That moment of exasperation didn’t just spark an idea — it ignited a mission. We couldn’t stand by silently; we had to build something better.

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Family and Community at the Core

From the start, Roots was never just another tech stack — it was personal. “We’re not just technologists — we’re parents,” I kept telling myself. This project was born out of late-night frustration, weekend brainstorming sessions, and a collective belief that public solutions should serve families — not burden them. Over the hackathon, others resonated with this vision. Teachers, parents, even fellow builders reached out to offer input, share stories, and affirm us: we weren’t building in isolation.

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A Team That Built Fast — and Together

Our team was a model of complementary strengths: two developers and AI enthusiasts, united by one shared goal. We weren’t bogged down by hierarchy or bureaucracy — typical in big systems like Raíces. Instead, we moved fast: iterating directly on real user needs. Whether it was a bug in voice‑agent integration or a UI flow tweak, fixes landed within hours.

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Memorable Human Moments

Shortly after we shared our story on LinkedIn, something incredible happened: people immediately joined the conversation to offer help. Educators, technologists, and even those connected to Madrid’s public school authorities reached out. Some offered introductions to elected officials in the educational space, saying things like, “We should bring this to the city council.” That moment—the community reacting to real action—was unforgettable. It wasn’t just validation; it was activation. It showed us that when you build with empathy and purpose, people don’t just applaud—they roll up their sleeves and collaborate.

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Shoutouts

To the educators and parents who shared their frustrations with us — you helped us shape Roots.
To the ElevenLabs and OpenAI platforms for unlocking magic at the edge of imagination.
To my team mate Fran for turning urgency into impact.
And to the World’s Largest Hackathon community for reminding us we’re not alone in wanting to build better systems.

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We came for the code.
We stayed for the mission.
We left with a team, a tool, and a renewed belief in public tech built for people.

🌱 Building Roots: Voice-First School System with ElevenLabs

Juan González Ponce — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 04:26:09 +0000

This is a submission for the World’s Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: Building with Bolt.

When we joined the World’s Largest Hackathon, we had one ambitious idea: reimagine how families and students experience education using voice, AI, and storytelling. The result was Roots — an open-source educational platform designed to support underserved communities with multilingual voice agents, real-time illustrations, and wellness tools for parents and children alike.

What We Built

Roots combines a modern school platform with AI-powered voice services. Some of our core features include:
Storytelling sessions with real-time illustrations, powered by ElevenLabs and DALL·E 3, where children see their story scenes drawn as they speak.
Voice-first tutoring in subjects like math, chess, and language learning.
Parent wellness coaching, offering stress management and support through 24/7 conversational agents.
Multilingual support, including Spanish, Chinese, Ukrainian, and Romanian — all localized with a hybrid translation system built on Lingo.dev.

We designed this for families who often don’t have access to elite tutoring, immersive tech, or robust educational systems. Roots brings that access directly to them — voice-first, mobile-ready, and completely free.

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Building with Bolt: The Technical Journey

We used Bolt.new to kickstart our frontend and backend with an ideal stack: React 19 + Tailwind CSS + Fastify with full TypeScript support. Bolt gave us a polished, preconfigured playground — the kind that lets you move fast and stay focused on creativity.

Within hours, we had the initial pages styled, routes defined, and real-time connections established using Server-Sent Events (SSE). Features like voice-driven storytelling and live image rendering felt like building scenes in a children’s book, but in code. Honestly, it’s the closest we’ve come to “writing a story” through software.

Bolt made prototyping joyful.

❤️ Favorite Feature

The integration with ElevenLabs’ voice agents through tool-calling was incredibly smooth.

{
  "name": "generate_story_illustration",
  "description": "Creates a beautiful illustration for the current story scene",
  "parameters": {
    "story_content": "The current story content",
    "characters": "Main characters in the scene",
    "setting": "Where the scene takes place",
    "mood": "The emotional tone",
    "current_scene": "Specific scene to illustrate"
  }
}

The agent would then call our Fastify backend, which triggered a DALL·E image, and we streamed that back to the user in real-time. Magic ✨

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AI Changed How We Build

We didn’t just use AI in the app — we also used AI to build the app. From generating type-safe prompt handlers to crafting localized translation flows, AI tools helped us go faster, spot edge cases, and even debug image latency issues.

AI paired with Bolt’s scaffolding created a real sense of creative momentum.

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One Bump in the Road…

One issue we hit with Bolt: it auto-pushed our code — including .env files — to GitHub. 😱 This broke some basic security expectations and nearly cost us our ElevenLabs and OpenAI keys.

We ended up switching environments for production and audit safety. It’s a small hiccup, and we’re optimistic Bolt will address it quickly, but it’s worth flagging for anyone building with sensitive keys.

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👥 Team

Built by a small team of two Madrid-based parents and technologists under the Roots project. This submission is published by @jgponce — special thanks to my team mate Fran and everyone who helped imagine a better future for public education.

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🧮 Developer Contribution Dashboard: A Meta Feature in the Making

One of the more meta and satisfying features we built during the hackathon wasn’t part of the public platform at all — it was an internal Developer Contribution Dashboard. Inspired by our own need to reflect and document, we created a tool that analyzes git history and surfaces insights like commit frequency, code quality, technical impact areas, and innovation highlights.

It tracks lines of production-ready code across all active days, highlighting areas of major work and contribution per each developer. The features maps our sprint timeline and most modified files to give a full-picture summary of our development effort. We think this could grow into a full product of its own — a personal portfolio generator or team impact tracker for hackathons and beyond.

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🎉 What’s Next?

Roots is just getting started. We’ll keep improving it beyond the hackathon — especially for schools that don’t have the funding or time to explore AI. Our next goals include character consistency across story illustrations, subtle animations, and collaborative storytelling sessions for classrooms.

If you’re building for impact, join us — let’s create tools that matter.