What is a hackathon. About how I participated in the hackathon: an invaluable experience! Programming languages, APIs, frameworks

In the modern world, there are many new terms that are incomprehensible to people. What is a hackathon? This is an event that has become very common not only in other countries, but also in Russia. Therefore, you need to know how a hackathon is held, what it is, what is needed for it. There are also rules for the successful organization of this event.

Definition

The words "hacker" and "marathon" formed a new concept "hackathon". What it is? To date, this term does not apply to the so-called programmer marathon.

The event involves gathering a team from various areas of software development. They are working on a task. Programmers, designers, managers can participate in the event. Hackathons last from 1 day to a week.

Tasks

It is important to create full-fledged software at this event, but some of them are held for educational and social purposes. It is customary to develop web services that will solve socially significant problems.

Creates mobile applications, web applications, infographics, also a hackathon. What it is? Thanks to this event, the first version of the application will be ready for launch. With it, it will be possible to test the work of the idea. Events vary in direction and subject matter.

How do they go?

First, a presentation is held, with which the hackathon begins. What does it give? This allows you to familiarize yourself with the event, as well as learn about the tasks. Then the participants propose ideas, and teams are formed based on interests and skills. Then comes the project work.

Participants at such events reinforce their strength with ready-made food, such as pizza, energy drinks. At the end, a presentation of projects is shown. Teams also share the results of their activities. Often hackathons are held in the form of a competition. Then the jury evaluates the participants and determines the winners who are given prizes.

Why are events needed?

They are suitable for designers, programmers and other professionals who are ready to get together to develop a new project. This is the purpose of the hackathon. Moscow offers a large number of events, since many companies are concentrated in this city.

Hackathons are needed for:

• acquaintances - many specialists can find each other in order to further share knowledge, as well as work on joint projects;
• creating a community - events are needed for active people who are interested in a specific problem;
• creative process - there is an opportunity to work in a free format;
• gaining new knowledge - at the event you have to face the tasks that were not there before;
• showing talent - an opportunity to demonstrate one's professionalism;
• implementation of new ideas - the event allows you to implement projects;
• startup projects - companies are interested in such events, choosing interesting projects for their further implementation.

Rules for organizing a hackathon

If the hackathon has social goals, then this is an excellent method of attracting talented specialists. The event is necessary for the implementation of new methods of solving problems. To organize a hackathon, you need to use the following tips:

• Determination of the goal: you need to establish what is important to solve at this event. Developers should be involved in it, because they know everything about creating applications. Experts and students will also be required. The more specialists from different fields will be, the more creative solutions will appear.
• Planning: preparation will take 3-6 weeks.
• Choosing a venue for the event: it can be organized at the office of an IT corporation or in a local cafe. It is advisable to choose the weekend for this.
• Attracting sponsors: food, prizes and a platform are considered the most expensive in a hackathon. It is necessary to attract sponsors in exchange for support.
• Story about the hackathon: participants need to tell in detail about this event. It is also necessary to disseminate information about the event using all modern means. Social media and the press will be useful for this.
• Food ordering: There must be enough food and drinks at the event.
• Preparing Prizes: There should be prizes for the winners as this affects the quality of the event.
• You should think about what could be critical situations. You need to use proven methods to prevent them.

Event at Sberbank

Many companies host events. Sberbank Hackathon is also organized regularly. Specialists from various fields are developing a web service or mobile application. Financial institutions require new features in mobile payments, transfers. Security features and the development of financial assistants are also needed. The winners are awarded cash prizes.

Thus, the organization of a hackathon is considered not such a difficult process. You just need to use all the tips presented, then the event will be successful. Thanks to him, new ideas and projects will appear that will be very useful for society.

(programmers, designers, managers) work together to solve a problem. Today, hackathons are no longer hacking, they are just programming marathons. Usually hackathons last from one day to a week.

Some hackathons are designed for educational or social purposes, but more often the goal of a hackathon is to create full-fledged software. Each hackathon focuses on a specific area, such as programming language, operating system, application, programming interface (API).

Story

The term appeared in 1999. It was independently adopted by the developers of OpenBSD and Sun Microsystems.

The OpenBSD developers first used the term to refer to a cryptography meeting in Calgary, Canada on June 4, 1999. It brought 10 developers to write programs that would not fall under the strict export restrictions imposed by the United States on cryptographic software.

Sun used the name "the Hackathon" during the JavaOne conference June 15-19, 1999; John Gage suggested writing a Java program for the new Palm V that would use infrared to communicate with other Palm users.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, hackathons became more common and were seen by companies and investors as a way to quickly develop new software technologies or areas of investment. Some well-known companies have been created on hackathons, such as GroupMe, which appeared at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 hackathon; in 2011 it was bought by Skype for $85 million.

Types of hackathons

For platform development

Some hackathons are dedicated to working on a specific platform, such as an operating system.

Development of applications for mobile platforms takes place, for example, at the Over the Air hackathon held in Bletchy Park (England), which attracts significant sponsorship contributions. Hackathons for the development of video and computer games are also held.

Music Hack Day is a hackathon dedicated to software and hardware for music. Since 2009, it has been held over 20 times in various locations.

Every year since 1999, a hackathon of developers of the OpenBSD operating system has been held.

Programming languages, APIs, frameworks

Since 2007, Perl hackathons have been held to improve the language itself. Haskell and Scala developers have similar events: Haskell Hackathon and Scalathon.

Hackathons were held to develop applications in HTML5 and Ruby on Rails.

Some hackathons are run by companies to write applications that use a common API. Yes, Yahoo! has hosted "Open Hack Day" since 2006 (originally "Hack Day"), which uses Yahoo! APIs and APIs owned by Yahoo! sites like Flickr. Google is hosting a similar hackathon for its own APIs.

Foursquare hosted a global hackathon in 2011 where over 500 developers in 30 locations developed applications using the Foursquare API.

This week, from November 18 to 20, an unusual event will take place in St. Petersburg - the first All-Russian hackathon hackRussia. For three days, schoolchildren and students will be able to try their hand at mastering professional cases from five areas - social services, finance and blockchain, agriculture and energy, education and culture, biotechnology and medicine. The Gorod + correspondent decided to figure out why such an unusual format is needed, how does a hackathon differ from a regular forum, and how effective is it?

The word "hackathon" is formed from two English words to hack (explore while programming) and marathon (marathon). The term first appeared in America in 1999. This is a special format in which participants for a limited period of time non-stop create not abstract solutions to the problem under discussion, but prepare specific products in the form of, for example, websites or mobile applications. According to the rules of the hackathon, the guys are divided into teams of two to four people. To win this race, you need to have a whole range of skills and qualities: natural curiosity, good communication skills, a sharp mind and a command of programming languages.

This approach is extremely relevant today, because students get the opportunity to interact directly with employers and enterprises. This allows them to correctly assess the needs of the modern labor market. A hackathon is also useful in terms of a quick and targeted exchange of knowledge and competencies between specialists from different fields, which also enriches the “professional baggage”.

The hackathon differs from the usual forum in the mobility of the workflow: on average, in 40 hours, participants must go from developing an idea to creating a working prototype. It is especially important that the final result should be practically tangible and could be applied in one of the spheres of human life. After all, the event is attended by investors who can identify the best projects and implement them. In addition, it is an affordable way to show young professionals that the industry is interested in their work and knowledge. Students' confidence in the future will help to avoid "brain drain".

For the first time, a nationwide hackathon will be held in St. Petersburg this weekend. Before that, of course, such events existed, but they were highly specialized and local in nature - basically, such “competitions” were held on the basis of individual companies, at the sites of universities or among programmers. Only now has it been possible to create an organized movement covering a variety of areas: it is planned that about three hundred participants from 45 cities will come to the opening ceremony on Friday, November 18.

Within a few days, schoolchildren and students will try to implement their work in five areas. As project manager Denis Samuilov said, various solutions will be proposed, for example, on the problem of drug distribution. “This case will be presented in the direction of medicine. In pharmacies, medicines often change in price. And they are not always available. We can aggregate this and do searches not only by the name of drugs, but also by generics (cheaper analogues. - Approx. ed.),” the specialist explains.

In addition, there will be a number of other useful projects at the hackathon: on the basis of Tinder dating applications, mobile applications will be developed for optimal housing search. And in the field of agriculture, they will think over ways to deliver products to the consumer as fresh as possible. It is impossible not to note the trend of the last year - programs based on human interaction with virtual reality. Experts associate the popularity of the topic with the sensational game Pokemon Go. This useful experience of working with alternative reality is planned to be adopted and used in the creation of virtual tours of museums, for example, the Hermitage.

On the final day of the hackathon, the results will be summed up. The winners will receive cash prizes in the amount of one hundred thousand rubles. They can be spent on the further development of your project. Other participants will get a unique experience and, possibly, fateful acquaintances.

Photos - group "Hackathon in Vkontakte"/https://vk.com, group "JourHack. 1st hackathon in data journalism in St. Petersburg"/https://vk.com.

The word "hackathon" was formed from the merger of the words "hacking" and "marathon". By hacking, of course, they mean not computer scammers, but IT technology lovers who find pleasure in research and the search for extraordinary solutions.

The first in the world took place in 1999. It was done by the developers OpenBSD OS in Calgary (Canada).

A group of researchers gathered there, who had to solve a difficult task: to find a legitimate bypass for the restrictions imposed by the United States on the export of cryptographic products from the country. They called the event a "hackathon", and colleagues immediately liked the term.

10 days later at the conference JavaOne company Sun Microsystems held a similar meeting, where she suggested that developers create a Java program for Palm V for data exchange between the gadget and the Internet via infrared.

Focus on success, a pleasant friendly format, simultaneous communication and competitiveness - all this made the new type of events attractive to participants and investors. So hackathons got a start in life.

Why do businesses need hackathons?

In 2016, according to hackaton.com, there were 3450 hackathons in the world. The United States currently tops the list with 1,568 events per year, followed by the UK (470 hackathons), Canada (230), Germany (223), France (196). A wide variety of specialists took part in them: developers for the web (36%), mobile systems (36%), hardware platforms (15%), robotic systems and AI (8%).

Russia is not on this list. Because, according to this source, only… one event was held in Russia in 2016.

Of course, this data is invalid. They only reflect the fact that the hackathon as a format for the development of an innovative economy is still growing in Russia. And even though the world still knows very little about hackathons in our country, the real state of affairs is much better than Western statistics.

So, according to the IT-dominanta portal, every month in 2016, 8-10 different events of this type were held in Russia. And only in April 2017, 19 major hackathons were held.

Perhaps hackathons would have remained a local phenomenon if large companies, investors, and “angels” did not pay attention to them. They assessed the potential for growth.

Instead of the tedious approvals and refinements that one has to deal with on regular projects, hackathons have offered a new format for prototyping at minimal cost. Within a few days, the organizers receive several solutions to the technological problem that they face at once.

On the other hand, companies are attractive: here you can not only meet strong developers, but also immediately test them in action. Finally, an important advantage of hackathons is networking with potential partners and promoting your own business.

What is the interest of the participants?

According to hackaton.com, professionals (42.8%), students (21.1%), "amateurs" (18.9%), entrepreneurs (9.6%), as well as those who who are looking for work (7.6%).

The theme of the hackathon is announced immediately, but the goals are not always announced, which adds mystery to the future event and attracts especially adventurous participants. This is done in order not to interfere with the birth of the result right before our eyes. "Miracles" can happen with the prize fund.

So, at the final stage of the Design Hackathon, which was held in Moscow at the end of July 2016 by Sberbank Technologies, the initial prize fund was announced in the amount of 200 thousand rubles. However, the results of the hackathon impressed the organizers so much that the prize fund was increased to 500,000 rubles.

The winner then was the Dream Team. She proposed a "smart voluntary health insurance solution" based on DNA test data. Experience, knowledge and initiative allowed us to achieve excellent results.

As experience shows, participants, in addition to the declared prizes, are interested in several points in hackathons:

• Job Opportunity in leading Internet companies and the prospect of meeting “necessary” people in professional development.
• Checking the strength of the development team in a non-standard situation: time is limited, adrenaline is on the limit, the competitive spirit haunts.
• academic interest. As a rule, in this case we are talking about teams that work independently, that is, they do not seek employment from the organizers. They are interested in testing the hypotheses that they have born to solve a particular software problem.

Hackathon rules of conduct

At first glance, becoming a winner is quite simple, but many fall for mistakes that cannot be made.

Mistake 1. Failure to comply with the ratio of speed and quality of project development

Many participants try to complete the project as quickly as possible, without taking into account that the most important thing for the jury is the result. Mistakes during hackathons are inevitable and should not be feared. But the idea that will be shown to the jury must be worked out in detail.

Mistake 2. Inability to work in a team

This is especially evident just in situations where you need to quickly get the result. At the hackathon, there is no time for long arguments, you need to be able to competently distribute roles and make compromise decisions.

Mistake 3. Forget about real goals

And perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the solution that the team proposes must have a real practical application. As we remember, business is interested in working ideas that the company will be able to implement tomorrow and get the desired result.

What will happen next?

If hackathons had no plans, then there would be no point in talking about them.

1. Topic shift. Five years ago, almost all hackathons were held to develop mobile applications. However, already last year, the topic of hackathons shifted towards the creation of systems related to artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Without any doubt, these topics will become top topics for future hackathons.
2. Intracorporate events. Today, the main trend for large companies is the emphasis on innovation and the development of creative connections within companies. Conducting intra-corporate hackathons allows you to form temporary teams within companies and gather people with different expertise into such projects.