Published Personal
Participating in a hackathon
Would you travel 600km in one direction to participate in a hackathon? Well, I did, and didn’t regret it in the slightest. I started to get a feel for it, and why people enjoy it so much.
How I found out about it
I was browsing the web for interesting coding events in Poland when I stumbled upon HackYeah. By taking a quick look, it felt like something I’d enjoy, only it was only 1 month away, a 6-hours train ride away from me and I had no team. So I decided to try to find one, by going on their Discord server. There were special channels dedicated to building teams, so I wrote a message about who I am and that I’m looking for people interested in participating.
Building a team
At first I wrote to a few people, but most didn’t reply. Well, one of them did, a designer, and it was a start. Next day a backend developer replied to my post and said he’d like to join. 3 of us started thinking about what task we want to pick and a type of project we want to build. It was honestly between Wellness and Activities open task and a government funded video analyzing one. After discussing a little, we had our eyes set on the speech analyzing one. With one week left to go, we also found a backend/infrastructure developer who fit amazingly to our needs and feel.
We didn’t want to have much done before the event, so we focused on the idea, research and building a prototype. Then it was time to ride a train at 5 AM to Kraków.
The event
It was a first hackathon for me, and I was taken aback by how well it was organized. It took place in a Tauron Arena, which is a huge arena for a sports event, and it was a great place for a hackathon. Whole floor was dedicated to us, there were like 2 thousand people there, and on the upper floor you had tea and cookie stands, sponsors, chill area, and a stage for workshops and talks.
After settling in and meeting my teammates for the first time in real life, clock struck 12 and we started researching and building our project. This hackathon lasted for 24 hours, and honestly I am shocked by how much can be done in such a short time.
I specifically loved working in a team where everyone loves coding, and knows what they are strong at. It was a pleasure to work with them, and I learned a lot from developers who are more experienced than me. Hackathon is a real great way to get to know someone who shares the same passion as you do, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is looking for a new experience.
The project
After reading the task description and requirements, we spent an hour on research and discussing about what is actually wanted from us. We wanted to build something useful that could be built in 24 hours. It was a speech analyzing app that would analyze videos and subtitles burned into them: coherence, clarity, pauses, sentiment, interactive charts, timestamps. Also we came up with an idea to compare videos, and suggest the best version of it.
Time was running out, and unfortunately we didn’t manage to make comparing feature work as good as we wanted, and we also didn’t have time to analyze emotions and gestures. Last 3 hours were something incredible, I was so focused I didn’t think about anything else.
Then, all of a sudden, 1 hours before the end, our server went down. We tried everything we could in that last hour, but in the end we were not able to save it. It is a pity, because we don’t know if we didn’t get to the finals because of it, or because we had a not so great app.
Still, it was hell of a ride. I want to thank my teammates and organizers for this experience. If you’ve read this far, here are some photos and videos from the event:
Afterthoughts
I am looking forward to participating in more of these, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is looking for a new experience. It is also a blessing to have found such a great team, that I am sure we will keep in touch and collaborate in the future.
40 hours of staying awake and not a minute of sleeping were totally worth it.
