October 27, 2015 at 20:49Hackathon HackingEDU - Results
From October 22 to 25, the HackingEDU hackathon was held in San Mateo, bringing together more than three thousand participants at the start. 36 hours of development, 35 lectures and master classes, several dozens of companies involved and whole weekend of fun!
Why did I decide to write about this event here?
First of all, since the organizers of the event, Alex and Cyril, have Russian roots, and Russian speech was often heard at the event itself.
In addition, this is my first hackathon in Silicon Valley, and this is an example of a great way to spend the weekend for the benefit of society and for myself.
The main thing to note is the distributed nature of the event. Distributed - this is when fewer people are sitting in front of the main stage than crowding around stands or in rooms with master classes. Which, probably, contradicts the idea, but it is true that panel discussions about the problems of education are less interesting than competitions or a demonstration of a laser projector.
People’s attention was focused on sponsor stands, which also acted as suppliers of APIs and technologies available to developers.
Sponsors were selected from companies associated with:
Participants were invited from all over America - Texas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York.
Personally, I was especially pleased to work with teams from IBM (the team is large, the company is even more considered a corporate colossus, but, surprisingly, they were ready to put up with my stupid questions for more than an hour, solve problems with the availability of their platform, hold a competition for involvement and knowledge Bluemix), Pebble (similarly, a representative of the development department helped a whole group of participants to understand the API and with interest took into account the wishes for the future) and Back &.
The latter gathered a master class of a slightly higher level than is usual at hackathons, and this was offset by a deep understanding of the product, developers' problems and the experience of their training.
For me, the hackathon was, above all, the opportunity to meet people. For this reason, I decided not to cooperate with the guys with whom I work at Cisco and assemble a team from scratch.
It turned out to be a bit more complicated. I arrived a little earlier than the event, and we were asked to sit at specially set tables outside. I managed to talk with several guys, some came in groups, they often did not have any ideas or any useful skills.
My ideas were bad too. The original goal was to play with a Pebble watch, for which the idea of an activity tracker of the Pomodoro type was invented, which would make a person move every hour.
At some point, a guy sat on a small bench, who seemed a little older than the rest of the guys around me. We got into a conversation, he told his idea about the problem of entering the “stream”, focusing on the task. To do this, he was going to use tracking of the active application and a small proxy server, which was supposed to filter traffic that was not related to the current task, and show the user more suitable things.
This idea seemed to me not too suitable for a hackathon (simple implementations of such things are in the “parental control” in popular antiviruses, and the smart version with training on user behavior is not a task for three days), so I was already prepared to search further. At that moment, two guys slowly walked by (as I managed to find out in fifteen minutes - from UC Davis), who seemed sad and demotivated to me. I got up, talked to them - and, surprisingly, they had a viable project idea!
We spent some time discussing the idea and our skills: in the end, we had three iOS developers and one back-end, so there was a problem with the distribution of tasks. One of the guys from Davis wrote a nice specification of the API, and it all happened.
As a result, in three days, after optimizing our solution for the hackathon tasks, the available prizes, our desires and needs of the world, it turned out to put together an application for iOS and an API for it, which built a psychological profile of a person according to his data from social networks. The code is available on my GitHub account, we welcome everyone who wants to use it - this is the decision of all team members.
The organizers managed to gather people from many universities, prepare the venue, almost all the necessary infrastructure.
Almost all sponsors were ready to help participants both using the API and solving problems in the project. It seems to me that a certain preparatory work and selection was carried out with them.
About “gather people” I said for a reason: it’s not customary to pay for tickets in the USA, even in the Valley everything is ambiguous, so custom-made buses to universities in California were a wide and visible gesture of goodwill.
At the end of the hall there was a series of tables where it was possible to consult with mentors on the project as a whole or on individual technologies that were not presented by the sponsors, but needed to create a project (C, C ++, Objective-C, Swift, JavaScript, Node.js, at least) .
How many teams reached the end of more than 780 (this is an estimate of 3114 people in the Slack channel, divided by 4 people maximum in a team) is not known, but at the award ceremony the top 10 teams showed really interesting developments. Our application, unfortunately, was not awarded either in the main category (Education-related apps) or in the areas of sponsors, but this was not the most important thing for us in participating.
Despite the long lines, there was enough food for everyone (note: if you are coming to the USA for an event, don’t be afraid to starve to death, on the contrary, don’t hide cookies in your pockets), sometimes they handed out water, fruits and Red Bull energy.
With coffee it turned out not so hot, only instant was available.
Also pleased that we thought about the rest: a platform for outdoor activities during the day, dancing and a championship in the evening and a separate room for sleeping at night.
As always, there was a fly in the ointment. Rather, such a rather big jar. As usually happens at events for several hundredgeeks , the Internet was not enough for everyone at first.
In all fairness, there was a bunch of Ethernet cables on each row of tables, Cisco switches under the tables, and USB-Ethernet adapters forMacBook visitors , which most visitors needed, were provided free of charge in the equipment rental department .
On the second day, on Saturday, put six more access points in the main hall, and as a whole they began to be missed. With a nakedWi-Fi Analyzer, one could see that the 5 GHz channel is freer than 2.4, but all that remains is to praise the organizers for creating points in both bands.
Another problem was the acoustics in the room (not so much the speakers themselves as the eerie reflection of sound from the walls), it was far from always possible to hear the presenter.
Communication by e-mail turned out to be a little blurred before the start of the hackathon, a message was not quite clearly heard about the need to bring sleeping bags, an offer to be added to the Slack channel and nominations. The last two aspects, however, were quickly resolved on the first evening.
As far as I know, this is the first event of this format for the organizing team, I can only praise them for their success in the end.
Personally, HackindEDU brought me a whole bunch of goodies:
It is not so easy to find out about such events for a person who has accidentally arrived; they are distributed through university newsletters, groups on social networks, corporate mailboxes.
One way I can advise mitaps , but not everything appears there; besides, it is impossible to distinguish large events from small ones.
Why did I decide to write about this event here?
First of all, since the organizers of the event, Alex and Cyril, have Russian roots, and Russian speech was often heard at the event itself.
In addition, this is my first hackathon in Silicon Valley, and this is an example of a great way to spend the weekend for the benefit of society and for myself.
About event
The main thing to note is the distributed nature of the event. Distributed - this is when fewer people are sitting in front of the main stage than crowding around stands or in rooms with master classes. Which, probably, contradicts the idea, but it is true that panel discussions about the problems of education are less interesting than competitions or a demonstration of a laser projector.
People’s attention was focused on sponsor stands, which also acted as suppliers of APIs and technologies available to developers.
Sponsors were selected from companies associated with:
- Education in general, infrastructure or individual educational areas (CapitalOne, Edmodo, Roblox, Chebb)
- Neurointerfaces (Thalmic with their Myo, Muse)
- Machine Learning and Data Analysis (IBM Bluemix, Clusterpoint)
- Web Development (Linode, Back &, Namecheap, CourseHero, Make School)
Participants were invited from all over America - Texas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York.
Personally, I was especially pleased to work with teams from IBM (the team is large, the company is even more considered a corporate colossus, but, surprisingly, they were ready to put up with my stupid questions for more than an hour, solve problems with the availability of their platform, hold a competition for involvement and knowledge Bluemix), Pebble (similarly, a representative of the development department helped a whole group of participants to understand the API and with interest took into account the wishes for the future) and Back &.
The latter gathered a master class of a slightly higher level than is usual at hackathons, and this was offset by a deep understanding of the product, developers' problems and the experience of their training.
our team
For me, the hackathon was, above all, the opportunity to meet people. For this reason, I decided not to cooperate with the guys with whom I work at Cisco and assemble a team from scratch.
It turned out to be a bit more complicated. I arrived a little earlier than the event, and we were asked to sit at specially set tables outside. I managed to talk with several guys, some came in groups, they often did not have any ideas or any useful skills.
My ideas were bad too. The original goal was to play with a Pebble watch, for which the idea of an activity tracker of the Pomodoro type was invented, which would make a person move every hour.
At some point, a guy sat on a small bench, who seemed a little older than the rest of the guys around me. We got into a conversation, he told his idea about the problem of entering the “stream”, focusing on the task. To do this, he was going to use tracking of the active application and a small proxy server, which was supposed to filter traffic that was not related to the current task, and show the user more suitable things.
This idea seemed to me not too suitable for a hackathon (simple implementations of such things are in the “parental control” in popular antiviruses, and the smart version with training on user behavior is not a task for three days), so I was already prepared to search further. At that moment, two guys slowly walked by (as I managed to find out in fifteen minutes - from UC Davis), who seemed sad and demotivated to me. I got up, talked to them - and, surprisingly, they had a viable project idea!
We spent some time discussing the idea and our skills: in the end, we had three iOS developers and one back-end, so there was a problem with the distribution of tasks. One of the guys from Davis wrote a nice specification of the API, and it all happened.
As a result, in three days, after optimizing our solution for the hackathon tasks, the available prizes, our desires and needs of the world, it turned out to put together an application for iOS and an API for it, which built a psychological profile of a person according to his data from social networks. The code is available on my GitHub account, we welcome everyone who wants to use it - this is the decision of all team members.
Good
The organizers managed to gather people from many universities, prepare the venue, almost all the necessary infrastructure.
Almost all sponsors were ready to help participants both using the API and solving problems in the project. It seems to me that a certain preparatory work and selection was carried out with them.
About “gather people” I said for a reason: it’s not customary to pay for tickets in the USA, even in the Valley everything is ambiguous, so custom-made buses to universities in California were a wide and visible gesture of goodwill.
At the end of the hall there was a series of tables where it was possible to consult with mentors on the project as a whole or on individual technologies that were not presented by the sponsors, but needed to create a project (C, C ++, Objective-C, Swift, JavaScript, Node.js, at least) .
How many teams reached the end of more than 780 (this is an estimate of 3114 people in the Slack channel, divided by 4 people maximum in a team) is not known, but at the award ceremony the top 10 teams showed really interesting developments. Our application, unfortunately, was not awarded either in the main category (Education-related apps) or in the areas of sponsors, but this was not the most important thing for us in participating.
Despite the long lines, there was enough food for everyone (note: if you are coming to the USA for an event, don’t be afraid to starve to death, on the contrary, don’t hide cookies in your pockets), sometimes they handed out water, fruits and Red Bull energy.
With coffee it turned out not so hot, only instant was available.
Also pleased that we thought about the rest: a platform for outdoor activities during the day, dancing and a championship in the evening and a separate room for sleeping at night.
Bad
As always, there was a fly in the ointment. Rather, such a rather big jar. As usually happens at events for several hundred
In all fairness, there was a bunch of Ethernet cables on each row of tables, Cisco switches under the tables, and USB-Ethernet adapters for
On the second day, on Saturday, put six more access points in the main hall, and as a whole they began to be missed. With a naked
Another problem was the acoustics in the room (not so much the speakers themselves as the eerie reflection of sound from the walls), it was far from always possible to hear the presenter.
Communication by e-mail turned out to be a little blurred before the start of the hackathon, a message was not quite clearly heard about the need to bring sleeping bags, an offer to be added to the Slack channel and nominations. The last two aspects, however, were quickly resolved on the first evening.
conclusions
As far as I know, this is the first event of this format for the organizing team, I can only praise them for their success in the end.
Personally, HackindEDU brought me a whole bunch of goodies:
- At least twelve new acquaintances, including people living a 15-minute drive;
- Experience with the Pebble API and Back &, another attempt to join the IBM Bluemix API;
- GoPro camera won in an individual competition by IBM;
- As well as five T-shirts, a backpack, a bunch of stickers on a laptop and other handouts.
It is not so easy to find out about such events for a person who has accidentally arrived; they are distributed through university newsletters, groups on social networks, corporate mailboxes.
One way I can advise mitaps , but not everything appears there; besides, it is impossible to distinguish large events from small ones.