Country hackathon in Finland

Good morning! Why morning?
Today I would like to tell you about how hackathons are conducted in Finland. First, I want to tell a little about myself. I came to this northern country almost three months ago to study for a bachelor in the specialty IT (information technology). Why, why and how, this material is not of today's article.

Let's move quickly to the event itself. Everyone knows that the most famous company from Finland - Nokia, also Microsoft cooperates with universities and students, respectively. Based on this knowledge, it becomes clear that almost all activities are funded by them. If you go even deeper, it is also clear that at events they are asked to use technology for the benefit of these companies. In short, write applications and games under windows 8.1 and windows phone 8.

Now about the hackathon itself. I was a little shocked by the organization, and I’ll say right away that I didn’t pay a single ruble (or a cent). Hackathon was in another city, so at 5:30 pm a bus was waiting for us at the building of our university (Actually, I’m not really studying at the university, I’m being translated into Russian as a polytechnic. But the building is still the same, so it’s not that important). After a 45-minute trip, we came straight to the polytechnic building in Salo (a small town in the southwestern part of Finland). Inside, we were already waited for registration, presented a T-shirt and even any nonsense: stickers, etc. Everything was in a very nice package from Microsoft. Sorry for the quality of the pictures, shot on the fact that there is.

Of course, I took a superman t-shirt.
Why rural? Because the hackathon was in a town with a population of several tens of thousands, and there were about 30 participants.

Not used to getting so much for free (sorry for slang, but in this situation is very suitable), I suspected something was wrong, but as it turned out later, here it is considered the norm. After a short speech from a Microsoft employee and an employee of a Finnish IT company, the hackathon began. Since it was a learning hackathon (the name of LearnCraft), the goal was to learn how to write applications and games for the platforms mentioned earlier using visual studio 2013 or unity. Unfortunately, the organizers did not take into account that not everyone has laptops capable of running on windows 8.1 quickly, and even in visual studio 2013. But for the rest, they provided the latest Microsoft operating system and a program for developing unique applications for it directly from a flash drive. We refused unity, because no one had experience in development, but I knew javascript for the web, and the time for playing the unity takes too much. What was decided? We agreed to write the application using javascript, html and css in the browser to speed up its development. In fact, I wrote the code entirely; the rest helped with information and graphics. What surprised me the most was the fact that we were fed throughout the 24 hours. In the end, I ate 5-6 times, plus coffee throughout the event.

As for the application. Our idea was an educational application, mainly for children. You were given a sentence with a missing word, in most cases a saying or a stable phrase. Also on the left side was a picture, looking at which the answer was obvious. To complicate the implementation and improve user interaction, it was decided to use Bing Speech-to-Text recognition (speech recognition). Later I cursed this choice, because the documentation is just awful, half of the methods are described incorrectly, even the examples do not work correctly or do not work at all. The user could either enter the word from the keyboard, or just say it. Unfortunately, recognition does not work as well as we would like, especially when you have an accent. But when our American friend tested the game, Bing miraculously learned all the words, even difficult phrases. After a few questions, you could see the statistics of the answers and hear how to pronounce the phrases correctly (How is it right? As the google translator said).
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After 24 hours of creepy code writing, it was difficult to present your application, especially after your laptop showed the screen of death ( it's time to reinstall Shindouz ) right at the beginning of the presentation. But it was even more offensive to hear someone else win this hackathon ...

But despite everything, we were very pleased with this event, especially its organization. We can say that we were alone in the whole building, no security, no passes. We could walk where we want, write code where we want, and ... well, you understand.

I would also like to separately mention entertainment. Two computers with a wheel, pedals and some kind of racing game were installed in the hall, I went for a couple of times to relax and realize mistakes. In addition, at 4 o'clock in the morning there was a dance contest: it was necessary to score the most points in the xbox game with kinect.

I can say that the hackathon system is well established and funded. There is even a special site where you can earn points for being on a hackathon; if you win, you get extra points. Subsequently, these points can be exchanged for phones on the super-unique system. This was my first hackathon, and I really liked it!

PS Who cares about my crutches, then I commit everything to the githab:

1. The first repository is the code for the browser version, everything is truncated, there is no speech recognition
2. Second repository - code from visual studio, running and final application

PSS If my post was not very boring, I can write what it is like to study in Finland + a comparison with a Russian university, since I studied for one year at Moscow Technical University.