Hackathon Apps4all: scandals, intrigues, investigations

Disclaimer:

I must say that this is not the first hackathon in which I participate, but this does not diminish the amount of enthusiasm.



If you are interested in what I, as an ordinary participant, remember this particular hackathon, then you are welcome under the cat.

')





Winners:



As such, there were no 2nd and 3rd places on the hackathon, but for myself I would have distributed them like this.



I would give 3rd place to an eccentric girl with the project “CareerUp”, who, through the word, said that she was from Pruffi (this is some kind of HR agency), all the time I spoke with a certain Alyona and called “figachit”. I have not seen such a bright performance on any hackathon yet!







2nd place rightfully belongs to the guys from IBM c project "% username% card". They did their homework well. The team had a bunch of new devices and they represented an application that uses some kind of Android 4.4 feature that allows you to work with a POS terminal through NFC. The main artifact of the team was a girl in a red dress.







By a strange coincidence, when I was looking for the 5th member in my team, I called her to us. But after a few days of correspondence, it turned out that she was still in another team. Oh, this is female curiosity.



1st place was taken by the guys with the project "Logos". A cloud security project was run with clients for Android and HTML5.

If anyone is interested in the demo you can see here - www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hk5lunDDrw







Hackathon:

As I said, this is not my first hackathon and I had something to compare with. Apps4all really know how to organize such events, for all the two days there was not a single question to the organizer at the hackathon. So far this is the most well-organized hackathon where I was. Of course, I really remember the shower on the hackathon in the Yandex office ... but this is a topic for a separate story.



Most surprised by the presence of master classes from sponsoring companies. This I have never met before.







Right on the hackathon, one could hear about the new developments of Samsung, Intel and Microsoft. It is a pity that Google did not have a booth.



As I understand these workshops are often held at conferences for developers, but who attends them? For example, on JavaOne from Oracle this year, from my group in the previous work, only leads could go. It was considered unprofitable to send regular developers to conferences or training.



I was a little sad at the hackathon from the fact that there are less and less such mastodons like me, bringing home from home. This time I was in proud loneliness. Well, I can not work on a laptop, even cut me. If there is 16GB of RAM, Raid array of SSD and an excellent screen, why should I sacrifice all this? Earlier though, guys with iMacs came, this time no one ...







How we prepared

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I do not use Scala at work, with work for Scala developers in Moscow not so much. There was a timid attempt to get to vuspenskiy , but since I could not write quicksort after a month of working with Scala, it was sent to the bolt from the dumpling. So I use this language only in my free time and I really like it. Considering the richness of the java-infrastructure, scala fits perfectly into it if you need to quickly do job done. We used this language for the backend.



According to the experience of past hakatons, we have been taught that you shouldn’t take up with something you have never worked with in strictly limited time. So on the hackathon of Yandex, I decided to fasten a new ORM for myself and spent 5 hours on it, which can be considered as epic fail.



To avoid such confusion, we asked Natalia Efimtseva from MS for an account in Windows Azure for startups using the BizSpark program. It played a cruel joke with us, because we heavily loaded VPS and therefore we took the most powerful machine, which we were turned off for lack of funds at 7 am right before the project presentation. Only thanks to the help of eyeofhell we were able to continue and submit our application.





Prizes



I usually go to hackathons for fun to chat and learn something new. This time, I purposefully followed the Xbox One. In some ways it helped us, we still won the xbox. It is a pity that he will appear with us only with the start of sales in Russia. I really wanted to play with the child in the New Year holidays.



Intel gave cool Harris Beach ultrabooks. For Windows lovers, I think this is the best laptop possible.



The representative of Google unfortunately was not at the presentation of the prizes, I hope that the prize from Google is still a trip to Google IO.





Tizen

The most vivid impression was acquaintance with the device on Tizen. Our application actively used Websockets and did not normally work under one of the mobile browsers (we checked Lenovo and Samsung tablets with different OS). On Tizen it just flew! I have not yet seen a more powerful mobile browser! Very cool stuff!



PS as usual, do not judge strictly, all IMHO.