Hackaton MentorHack: Inside out
How to visit a large complex in Moscow, not get a coffee break and feel in a cryochamber?
Training
We have long wanted to participate in a hackathon, test our skills, offer our idea and implementation. This is a great experience for any team. For us, this is also an occasion to delve deeper into training, since StarStaff is about staff training and franchisees. Increasing the effectiveness of training, you can reliably gain a foothold in the market, and if the idea is unusual, then this will help to move the digital education itself.
We prepared ideas, considering different points of view on mentoring. As a result, before leaving, they clearly formed each one's ideas. It consisted in training employees using additional testing by voting to discuss the reasons for this or that choice. And for greater adequacy of training, we put employees in random bundles, concluding the most successful ones. Anonymity in the discussion gives a greater involvement in the proof of one’s choice and belief, without relying on authority or personal sympathy. We made preparations for future work. They were from the category of the simplest: to create repositories and configure everything for coding, a sketch of the future design with the construction of a modular grid. All.
We formed a team of four, although there are five of us. We knew where we were going and decided to play honestly. At least our conscience is clear.
School disco.
February 13. Moscow. ENEA. Huge pavilion number 75, where you can arrange full-scale star warriors on copter ships. The hackathon was an offshoot of the three-day Mentor educational and technical forum. This is a big event in which many things can go wrong, and we tried to take the side of the workers and organizers. But the first disappointment awaited us at the entrance: the organizers could not cope with the influx of forum participants and the hackathon, having about 20 racks with registration and another 10 with self-registration.
“You can go sit in the hackathon hall and then make badges,” they told us. After we entered the hall, the rules changed and it was said that you cannot be here without a badge and we returned to registration. Having stood for about an hour "ma-a-a-scarlet" line, we were met by the complete incompetence of the registrants. I had to reprint this badge several times and in the end it was still wrong. We needed the Hackathon 24 marking for round-the-clock access, but they printed the “Member” to us. But we only found out about this in the evening, when we had already worked on the project for about 5 hours.
The main focus of the forum was on the exhibition stands of different companies, with different animations, music, communication, on closed areas under the open dialogue of invited people. Against this background, the hackathon platforms resembled a closet under the stairs. And the sound walking from all the cracks joyfully overlapped the monologue of speakers on the hackathon.
The teams gathered. Decided on a vector. And at 4 o’clock they started to work. There was a lot of enthusiasm, ideas were seething, and productivity was at the peak of opportunity. So began a journey of 48 hours.
Saving is not possible
At 19:00 every day there is a checkpoint for everyone. We communicated in our development with a group of specialists. They wanted to see the project from the side in order to cut off the excess and delve into something point-like. It was a confession. Closer to 22:00, it was our turn to repent of our sins, where they listened to us for 7 minutes and were allowed to continue working. Maybe everything was ok? No idea. We continued to work.
As already mentioned, Pavilion No. 75 is huge. It is unrealistic to heat it in winter without equipment, so it is heated by the number of people inside and solar heat. And at night it turns into an ice castle. No heating appliances. No conditions for real life inside. And we had to live two days. You sleep on pear ottomans. You freeze, hoping to fall asleep as soon as possible so that it is warmer in the morning from the sun. They were so cold that they had to leave for the warmest place in the whole building - the entrance corridor, where heaters are constantly working on the doors. You bask for half an hour and go back to work or sleep if you are completely tired.
A day passed and in the morning the sun came out, heating the air in a few hours. But they could not refuse jackets. Why stress your body if the cold can come at any time. They fed very tightly on coupons. In our hall, strange faces appeared, they were talking with someone, something was happening around. Perhaps it was the team mentors or just interested. We could not know for sure.
Closer to the evening checkpoint, we realized that the project should be taken away from training to team building, as this was more suitable for hackathon topics. It was necessary to understand where and how to take statistics in order to assign points to employees for further formation of teams. Therefore, we discussed exactly this with experts. We were asked to add mentors to the system and get rid of HR. There was only a problem with statistics and we went into discussion.
Around the world adventure in 6 hours
The discussion dragged on until 2 nights and came down to the fact that it is worth making a “U-turn”. The idea was built around an anonymous chat that a mentor could join. The mentor wrote a list of “live” tasks for employees, and the system itself randomly selected groups to solve them. During the responses, the mentor noted the best employees. The system memorized this and built the tree of relationships, which were then displayed to the mentor in the form of successful or optimal teams. In the chat, no one knows each other, like the mentor who notes employees. Here again, authority or personal sympathy does not work. Pure objectivity.
Although there was little time left and there were tight frames, a dream was necessary. In the morning everyone woke up, set tasks and sat down to work. We erased almost everything that we did before, and wrote again in 6 hours. It took 6 hours to not fully realize our idea and we were upset. There wasn’t enough to complete and debug the demo, but at 15:00 we submitted the project with a presentation. And an hour later they were already sitting in the hall for the presentation of the idea.
We performed sixth. Each was given three minutes to not delay and the jury managed to ask questions (by the way, why could not everyone ask them, but only the jury members?). Someone was pushy and continued speaking after a stop signal. We acted in good conscience - stopped. And only later, having returned home and looking at the recording, they found out that we had been cut back for a minute. But at that moment there were many thoughts in my head. Everything from the team decline, that not everything worked out and we expected a complete defeat on the part of the rest, both from ideas and before implementation. We did not hear anything for which we would applaud while standing. There were good social projects that were built on real problems, but everything else was sucked out of the finger, or did not work or remained at the level of the idea. There were ideas that had nothing to do with mentoring. But the most annoying thing that there were teams that worked remotely, and two of them were inside the hackathon, who later stated from the stage that "the guys worked hard all 48 hours, only at home." Someone has been working on the project for 6 months and brought it in order to teach something to analyze during this time.
Why then do you need such a hackathon? What was discussed at these checkpoints then and how were these projects conducted? It's a shame not from the fact that we did not win anything, but from the fact that there were no strong projects, as well as common rules for everyone.
But still we won our prize. The results were also summarized by representatives of the GoTo programming school. In their ranking on technical implementation, we were in 4th place out of 32, and in the overall ranking we were not even in the top ten. 6 hours to create a project. Fourth place. Packed up and left for home.
Thoughts?
Although this was the first hackathon in our life, but I am sure that it should not be organized like a school disco, where no one knows anything, bustle, the organizers cannot agree with each other. And to sleep in the cold was absolutely wild. Of course, we did not come for comfortable conditions. We were driven by the idea, implementation, competition and the expectation of strong innovative projects. But if everything continues, it’s better to give birth to ideas at home, realize them yourself and fight for your mark in the techno field.