Word count: 850
Preface
Due to: endless assignments, training, responsibilities and possibly because I forgot to sign up, I did not manage to attend any hackathons previous year. And as I currently have no excuses, I decided to attend at least a few this year (2017-2018).
Hackathon Day
Morning
Stayed up the night before the hackathon day trying to think of possible project ideas and figuring out how I’m getting to the location. The plan? - get to the city few hours before doors open, explore the city, get as much valuable stuff from the hackathon sponsors as I could and find myself a team.
What actually happened: Forgot to set an alarm and missed my train, by the time I got ready and made it to the station - missed my 2nd train. Fortunately, due to my plan for getting to the venue ahead of time guaranteed that I had plenty of time to spare. Unfortunately, that meant I didn’t manage to explore Manchester.
Luckily rest of my plans seemed to have worked out and I found myself a team - a group of MMU students.
Afternoon
Most of the afternoon focussed around attending talks, talking to sponsors, and figuring out what project to undertake!
The Team
Few hours into the hackathon it became clear that it was unclear what challenge our team wanted to tackle.
The team was comprised me and 3, newly second year CompSci students. From what I gathered, I was the most experienced person in the team when it came to writing software and unfortunately throughout the duration of the hackathon I couldn’t pin down what the others were good at.
Project Ideas
Just like with every hackathon and new team, there were a ton of ideas, within the first few hours we had ~5 different projects we considered doing, and I was fine with doing any of them as all presented something I could really dig into, enjoy, and learn about (i.e., using drones’ camera to do some short range data collection and image processing).
As I had no personal preference I left the final say up to rest of the team, but after flip-flopping for far longer than we should have, me and one of the other guys (lack of sleep, and writing this few weeks after the event makes it hard to remember the name - sorry!) put our feet down and through basic means of deduction shortlisted few projects we could successfully accomplish as a team (taking into consideration our skillsets, interests, remaining time and possible prizes).
We settled down on an educational game which had primary focus of increasing the appeal of programming/computer science to young people.
Progress
After utilizing some of my magical ‘managerial skills’ to use I helped establish the general theme and topics of the game (actual topics were suggested by others within the team), we decided on the language we were going to write the game in, how we were going to make the game playable through the browser and various other pieces of generally useful guidelines.
Now I’m not someone who blames others, nevertheless one of the team members, who shall remain nameless, was one of the least useful team members I have ever had to work with (and I’ve worked with me in the past!). Simplest way I can put it is; all talk and nothing to back it up with (and sprinkle in endless disruptiveness to sweeten the deal).
With countless hours wasted, a disruptive team member and essentially all of our work going down the drain when the guy locked his’ PC and with all the code and left for several hours, I gave up as there was nothing in my power I could do to bring the team up or produce something worthwhile myself. (Note that all my efforts of asserting usage of git went nowhere).
Night/Morning
After abandoning the group project, I invested my time in working on my own, side project which I mentioned in some of the previous blogs. And just like with the previous blogs; I was refactoring old code, and to make things more interesting enforcing the improved architecture!
I will hopefully get around to implementing some actual game logic into the system soon, and will be able to start talking about the development process of the said side project. However, for now it shall remain a fun pastime!
Epilogue
All in all, I’d say the hackathon was ok, I managed to get talk about graduate roles with some of the sponsors, proved to myself that I’m not too old to be able to pull off a 24-hour event, had some pretty good food, attended few workshops/talks (quantum computing and programming paradigms which I was led to believe would be a talk about .NET) and worked on my personal project for first time in a while.
I will definitely be attending more hackathons later on just to see whether my rapid prototyping and learning skills are as good as I believe them to be, build interesting solutions and generally have a good time. If you’re reading this and haven’t been to a hackathon before, I would highly recommend attending at least one!