Hackathon or how to get 48 hours of fun

Hey! Today I want to share with you our experience, how we’ve spent 48 hours with tones of coffee and limited amount of sleep. No, we didn’t have a deadline or non-stop party night. It was way funnier (and you also can get it from article’s name). It was a hackathon time!

Event and Team Introduction

The event is Stuttgart Hackathon. It’s running every year since 2012. I could say, running a bit ahead, that the organisation of this event was on really high level. We didn’t think about anything except of development process. The location was a loft style huge building named as Römerkastell. It fitted perfect for such kind of event. There were a spacious hall, where later all presentations ran, and separate spaces for teams. I’ll stop here and leave link to web-site of the event below, if you want to know more about this event — click link. Maybe one more thank to orgs for such a great atmosphere. Initial team(I’d like to under-cross the word “Initial”):

• Me(Alex), a guy who knows something about C++/Go;
• Zoia, a girl who knows something about C#/C++;
• Sergey, a guy who knows something about C++/Python;
• Dimon, a guy who knows something about Python; At start we had a nice team of friends from CIS=) We came up with a perfect name as “Dratuti”, what means “Hello”, but if it was said it really weird way.

Preparation or “what is going on here?”

That happened about 6 months ago. We decided to assemble a team and took a part in the local (Stuttgart) hackathon. I think, that was a first experience of participating in such event. We were excited about upcoming challenges.

We defined some preparation steps:

• A bit of researching. Our team has checked the history of hackathon, who were judges, how event was hosted before etc.
• We wanted to have a talk to define an existing tech stack, which we can use, but… we had just forgotten to discuss it. I hope, that we will fix this omission before next event=)
• One hour “Brainstorm” meeting.

I think, that this meeting could be a topic even for separate blog, but I’ll try to keep it short. It was hard to start, we had an understanding what do we want to do. Now I can say, that the main reason was uncertainty. We didn’t have any sort of clue how to proceed further. We tried really hard to generate some ideas, but you won’t get good ones, if you are forcing them kinda “on demand”. Anyway we had some sort of agreement to have those “thoughts” as backup and hope to have some inspiration right during event. If you will ask me: “Could make something more as preparation?” I would say, that sure! Perhaps not a technical part, but to discuss more the responsible areas in before. Anyway we had such “knowledge” baggage and we jumped on the “hackathon train”.

Day 1 or “OVER 9000 THINKING POWER”

We’ve started quite impressive that day… We missed a beginning of the event =( Traffic jam is terrible thing in Stuttgart. So we were later for about 30 minutes. Our team was lucky to arrive right before the announcement of challenges. We carefully listened to the organisational part and the desperation began… There was a time for generating of project’s topic. We were asked to provide an idea on which we would work during the hackathon, otherwise we wouldn’t be listed in the final submission. Our team separated in order to get more input from sponsors, who had provided those challenges. There was a “direction” of the idea as a result of such searching. We wanted to dig into the direction of car-sharing services, but that was not enough.

And here we got some real luck. We were just standing next to one of sponsor’s stand and discussing our possibles ideas. There was a guy (Michael) next to us. He jumped right into our talk and proposed an idea, which had been correlating with our “direction”. Michael had no team(he kinda had, but his team just disassembled right before beginning), so we decided to invite him to us. I think, that such event intended to have friendly and “easy-to-socialize” atmosphere. I encourage you to be more open on conferences, hackathons and meetups. All these things are here to just bring more communication and friends in our lives=)

So we finally assembled full team and were ready to start HACK! Yeah! Finally, right? Kinda of… We occupied our team space, a desk and a whiteboard (plus some awesome goodies from sponsors). Thinking process initiation in 3… 2… 1… ERROR!

It was really late at that point and brain-power was at lower possible level, but somehow we started a discussion what to do. That process was so breathtaking, that everyone got involved in.

I think after an hour, there was a plan which could pretend to be a standalone “car-sharing” start-up, but it was not suitable for 2 days hackathon =) After some stripping down major part of it, a roadmap was established. As a result, we wanted to create a system, which could analyse different outputs(weights) about city state (like traffic jam, sport events, weather etc) and predict a demand of shared-cars for the specific region of the city. Manhattan, NY was chosen as a region.

What did we have at the end of the first day? Kinda of plan and no confidence at all. We still had a lot of discussions during the night, if we should change a plan or modify it even more. Sounds a bit demotivating and gloomily, but every of us realised, that we have enough passion to accomplish something great during this hackathon As a small summery: Great passion will overcome all troubles and difficulties.

Day 2 or “Finally, THE CODE”

Morning. Breakfast. Our team space. So here the story about hard coding and extra motivation should begin, but — no, not at all. Here I have to mention a small problem, which every team has to consider at preparation phase. You better think about work distribution. We had some ideas… but we had no plan how to proceed further. I’ve just started to do something. I thought, that it could provoke other teammates to dive into the “coding” ocean. Luckily, that worked well. I’ll briefly describe, what we did and how. I think, that this blog is not about engineering part, but more about feeling.

We’ve designed and developed a fake-”BigData”-generator for our needs quite fast. Made some investigation about machine learning algorithms and picked appropriate one (we think so ;-)). We had been quite confident in our backend part. The only problem was to get frontend part ready, aseptically web-frontend. No-one of us had any clue about that weird and dark area of web thingy. We’ve just started to dig int that HTMLCSSJS thing, when we met 2 guys (Dennis and Rahul). Their team just disassembled (on 2nd day huh :-() and they worked on kinda similar approach, but more in direction, how to analyse DBahn(German rail company) data. We’ve decided to merge our teams, that guys could continue to hack =) And here we are 7 buddies, and, luckly for us, Dennis knew how to handle HTMLCSSJS monster. We fired up our laptops and jumped right into our code-mess.

We had a local prototype somewhere around 12 PM. Special thanks to guys from Altemista Cloud, who provided hosted servers for every team, which had needed it. We were tired, but so proud, that we had put all those part together into one working hell-machine. Time to get some rest. There was one decision to move preparation of the speech and presentation to next day.

Every one agreed, that idea was great. Was it so?

Day 3 or “You better think about presentation”

Morning around 8:30AM. After nice breakfast we gather for last run. Just few words about last day schedule:

• 9:30 AM: 1st Jury round;
• 1:00 PM: Presentation on scene; (3 mins per team)
• 1:45 PM: Announcement Top-16;
• 4:00 PM: 2nd Jury round;
• 5:00 PM: Awarding;

We tried to prepare a perfect speech and presentation. We had 2 parts: 1st was about problem and solution on high level, 2nd was about technical part. We’ve divided responsibilities to handle different topics. There were few technical slides: some about machine learning part and full tech-stack, which we had used in development process. There was a story line through main presentation about Sandy Sandwich and her bad need in the rent car. Here I want to warn future “hackers”, you better get a “presenter” in your team. Our slides were complete disaster: weird pictures, different resolutions, water-marks everywhere. We were desperate. We thought, that there had been no chance to pass to Top-16 for us. 1st Jury round passed more or less “okeyisch”. We had a talk with part of juries. This round was just to filter out some projects, who can made it to Top-16. Juries asked about solution and how+why we had decided to do that.

And… Tam-tam-tam… Presentation time. Every team had 3 min to show highlights of the project. Perhaps some other teams thought, that this timeframe had been ridiculously small, but we did not. It was like forever. Luckily, main character Sandy Sandwich worked quite well, we got warm feedback from audience.

Anticipation. We were so excited about result. It was first hackathon for us, as I said. I thought, that just participation is good enough for us, but “Appetite comes with eating”. Jury announced us ad TOP-16 team, which was allowed to move to next round. That was fabulous feeling. It worked. The project was not so bad! Yeaaaah! And… again just waiting. There were a round for 3 hours, where attendees had possibility to talk with participants, ideas. Our team failed first part of it… We just forgot to set up our stand. We fixed it. There were 2 laptops: one with running slide about Sandy Sandwich story and 2nd — with running solution: Heat-map of Manhattan, NY, where user can choose a time and get a prediction of car-demand in specific regions. That was mostly backend solution, which could help car-sharing company to better optimise car rearrangement depending on time and provide better experience to customer (less waiting time for a car).

There were some nice talks with attendees. It was awesome to share ideas with others. I think every team enjoyed this event. Time passed fast. We made it fast till 2nd Jury round. There were 7 nominations to win. Now we wanted one of them. I don’t know, where we switched our minds for “Yeah, let’s just try and have fun” to “Yeah! We’ll do it! Prise is our!”. That was a longest 30 minutes during all event.

Announcement. We won! Stage. Photo. One more photo. We picked our stuff. We were eating in local burger restaurant. Home. Waaaaaait! What did just happen? Did we get a prise? Really? Than, I think, — Yeaaaaahh! Wow! Everything was so fast. We got a prise from hackathon’s sponsor NTT Data for innovative and valuable solution. We were happy. We are still happy. The prise was a fully paid trip to Munich to their creative space. We’ve already have it, maybe it’s a topic for another article.

Summary

We had an awesome experience. It’s priceless to spend so amazing time un surrounding by such creative people. Everyone thinks in kinda same way. We are engineers and we just want to build something cool! I’m encourage everyone to try it. I’m sure, that you will enjoy as much as we did. Hope you liked this short story. See you later.

P.S.

This post is my first one. I don’t allude to something, but before I had a nice experience with 1st tries ;-)