Hackaton MentorHack: Inside out

How to visit a large complex in Moscow, do not get a coffee break and feel like in a cryochamber?

Training

We have long wanted to participate in the hackathon, test our skills, offer our idea and implementation. This is a great experience for any team. For us, it is also a reason to delve into training, as StarStaff is about staff training and franchisee. Improving the effectiveness of training can be firmly established in the market, and if the idea is unusual, it will help move the digital education itself.

We prepared ideas, considering the different points of view on mentoring. As a result, before leaving, they clearly formed the ideas of each one. It consisted in training employees with the use of additional voting testing with a discussion of the reasons for this or that choice. And for greater adequacy of training, we put employees in random ligaments, making a conclusion about the most successful ones. Anonymity in the discussion gives greater involvement in the proof of their choice and persuasion, without relying on authority or personal sympathy. We made preparations for future work. They were from the category of the simplest: create repositories and configure everything for coding, a sketch of the future design with the construction of a modular grid. Everything.

We formed a team of four, although there are five of us. We knew where we were going and decided to play fair. At least our conscience is clear.
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School disco.

February 13. Moscow. VDNH. Huge pavilion number 75, where you can arrange full-scale star warriors on the ships-kopterah. Hackathon was an offshoot of the Mentor educational and technical three-day forum. This is a great event in which many things can go wrong, and we tried to take the side of workers and organizers. But at the entrance, the first disappointment awaited us: the organizers did 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 hall hackathon, and then make badges" - told us. After we entered the hall, the rules changed and it was said that without a badge it was impossible to stay here and we returned to registration. After about an hour of “ma-a-a-scarlet” standing in line, we were met by complete incompetence of the registrants. I had to reprint this badge several times and in the end it was still wrong. We needed the label "Hakaton 24", for round-the-clock access, but we were typed "Participant". But we found out about this only 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, to closed areas for an open dialogue of invited people. In their background, the grounds under the hackathon resembled a closet under the stairs. And the sound walking from all cracks happily blocked the monologue of the speakers on the hackathon.

The teams have gathered. Decided on the vector. And at 4 o'clock began to work. There was a lot of enthusiasm, ideas were seething, and productivity was at the peak of opportunity. Thus began the journey of 48 hours long.

Saving is impossible

At 19:00 every day there is an OVERALL FOR EVERYONE checkpoint. We communicated on the development with group of experts. They wanted to see the project from the side in order to cut off the excess and go deep into something pinpoint. It was a confession. Closer to 10:00 pm our turn came to repent of our sins, where we were listened to 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 the winter without technology, so it is heated by the number of people inside and solar heat. And at night turns into an ice castle. Neither heating devices. Not any conditions for real life inside. And we had to live two days. Sleeping on pear-ottomans. You freeze, hoping to fall asleep quickly, so that in the morning it is warmer from the sun. They froze so much that they had to go to the warmest place in the whole building - the entrance corridor, where heaters constantly work above the doors. You warm yourself 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 peeped out, heating up the indoor air in a matter of hours. But from the jackets could not refuse. Why stress your body if the cold can come at any moment. Fed very densely, coupons. Strange faces appeared in our hall, people were talking to someone, something was happening around. Perhaps it was the team mentors or just interested. We couldn't know for sure.

Closer to the evening checkpoint, we realized that the project should be diverted from training to the formation of teams, as this suited more closely to the topics of the hackathon. It was necessary to understand from where and which statistics to take, in order to assign scores to employees for the further formation of teams. Therefore, we discussed this with experts. We were offered to add mentors to the system and get rid of HR. There was only a problem with the statistics and we went into the discussion.

World adventure in 6 hours

The discussion dragged on until 2 in the morning and came down to what it was worth doing 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 remembered it and built the tree of interrelations, which were then displayed to the mentor in the form of successful or optimal commands. In the chat, no one knows each other, nor does the mentor, who notes the staff. Here again, authority or personal sympathy does not work. Pure objectivity.

Although there was little time left and there was a hard frame, but sleep was necessary. In the morning everyone woke up, set tasks and sat down to work. We erased almost everything we did before, and wrote again in 6 hours. It took 6 hours to not fully realize our idea and we were upset. It was not enough for a little to complete and debug the demo, but at 15:00 we passed the project with a presentation. An hour later, they were already sitting in the hall for the presentation of the idea.

We were sixth. Each was given three minutes to keep the jury in check and had time to ask questions (by the way, why could not anyone ask them, but only members of the jury?). Someone was stubborn and continued to speak after the stop signal. We did conscience - we stopped. And only later, returning home and looking at the record, we found that we were cut off the performance for a minute. But at that moment there were a lot of thoughts in my head. Everything from the team decline, that not everything worked out and we expected a complete defeat from the rest, both from ideas and before implementation. We did not hear anything for which we would have applauded standing. There were good social projects that were based on real problems, but everything else was sucked from the finger, or did not work or remained at the level of the idea. Passed ideas that did not relate to mentoring. But the most annoying thing was that there were teams that worked remotely, and two of them were inside the hackathon, who then said 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 need such a hackathon? What was then discussed on these checkpoints and how did these projects lead? It's a shame not because we didn’t win anything, but because there were no strong projects, like uniform rules for everyone.

But still we won our prize. The results were also summed up by representatives of the GoTo programming school. In their rating for technical implementation, we were in 4th place out of 32, and in the overall rating we did not even make it to the top ten. 6 hours to create a project. Fourth place. Gathered things and went home.

Thoughts?

Although this was the first hackathon in our life, I am sure that it should not be organized like a school disco where nobody knows anything, turmoil, the organizers cannot agree with each other. And sleeping in the cold was completely crazy. Of course, we did not come for comfortable conditions. We drove the idea, implementation, competition and the expectation of strong innovative projects. But if everything also continues, it is better to give birth to ideas at home, implement them yourself and fight for your mark in the techno field.

Project security video on hackathon