As a local GUG leader I was sent to Google Hackathon Warsaw to see how hackathons work. It was the first google hackathon in Warsaw and it was nothing short of spectacular.
The goal of this hackathon was to make a Chrome application using HTML5 and deploy it to Chrome web store. We were told whats going to be happening all day, some basic guidelines. The theme of the day was “creative science” with science being anything from chemistry to psychology.
It was time to present ideas for apps. Everyone could present their idea in a short time, then the collaborants would approach presenter and teams were created. Some teams / ideas merged to create even more awesome projects.
Some on the other hand didn’t join any team, nor presented their ideas. This was at first my case as I felt unworthy to join the teams that had ideas I liked or didn’t like the ideas I felt worthy of joining. Let me just say that being alone at a hackathon is a sure way to ruin your experience and generally waste a day.
But, all was not lost as Javi joined me in making a tunneler game. I have had written some code for the game from before which I thought was nice to have. Bad bad idea! Don’t ever come to hackathon with existing code. The fact that we didn’t write the code together resulted in a situation when I was working at the hieroglyphs I have written before and Javi couldn’t really dive into the code.
I imagine that if you are making a any app you still want to divide the tasks so that you don’t bump into each other too much, but having code the other guys in your team don’t understand is just against what hackathon represents. So make sure you start from scratch.
Working together with Javi was fantastic experience. Although we couldn’t both dive deep into the code we were forced to collaborate as much as possible. First there was not enough time, (which is actually a good thing to have!) and second the game we were making turned out to be far less simple that I thought.
Hence my third fail of the day - choosing non-trivial project. If you think you need more than two hours to make your project, simplify it!!! All that matters is that you can make it in the time thats given to you and that you can all have fun doing it.
During the day there were loads of food and drinks of all sorts. Coffee, Colla, Fanta, Sprite, Tea, Juices.. just pick yours. I personally drank about 3-4 coffees and a Colla. Food was no less excelent. All kinds of food in and more than you can eat. If you host a hackathon, make sure to provide food and drinks.
Even though codebase was cryptic and there were loads of bugs were had a lot of fun with Javi. It is very important that you have fun during coding and don’t stress about it too much. This makes me think about regular programmer jobs. I wonder how things can even remotely work the way the workplace is commonly setup and run.
If you go to hackathons I recomend you pair with someone who you don’t know and likes to smile. This is one of the few thing I did right and I can only recomend this: Make sure to team up with someone you don’t know yet. If you or the other person have different skills thats even better.
When the time was up everyoone had 3 minutes to prosent their project. We didn’t have a working game yet and the code was very buggy. Still I think its good to present what you have, because you didn’t sit there all day doing nothing and it is only fair to show what you were at least trying to do when others killed themselves to show you theirs. So present what you did or were trying to do in any case.
If I were to rank this event, it would get 12 out of 10 points. It had a very important aspect to me - active involvement and collaboration.
There is only thing I would improve - I would talk to all the participants, ask them what they’re working on and made sure everyone has a team and would encourage them to join some. It sound weird but even I felt shy from the beginning and if I didn not join a team or not engage I would have ruined the experience for myself.
I would like to thank Michael Mahemoff, Ola and other organizators for throwing such a great evend and also to all the contestants who made the most awesome things I’ve seen created in such a short time.
This hackathon showed me collaboration at its best and I recomend you do whatever you can (for me it was 5 hour train ride) to attend such an event.
Oh and if you want to see our Tunneler, you can play with it here:
The code: https://github.com/hakunin/TunJs (the worst mess I have even written, the most experience I got in 6 hours of programming)
The winning app is a screen reader. Turn it on and hover over text. It will read it for you https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nddfhonnmhcldcbmhbdldfpkbfpgjoeh#
