The fourth HackFMI, now traditional, hackathon was held this weekend. It is over and I still can't wrap my head around what happened during these 3 nights. Here's bits of code, beer, energy drinks and fun as I saw it.
A big thanks goes to Lilly and Misha who were running around like robots managing the day-to-day activities. Kudos to the rest of the team as well because they've established HackFMI as a tradition and people already ask when is going to be the next event.
What
This year the topic was Hack for charity and immediate goal of raising money for a sick kid. Most of the teams got to work to meet these goals. Only a few had worked on slightly different charity (broadly defined) ideas.
My favorite two apps were Blago-darenie and SMShelp although they were not developed with Django.
Blago-darenie is a simple WordPress site listing donation campaigns. Instead of directly donating money one needs to promise something (an action, an object, etc) and put a price tag on it. When the promise is claimed the two parties donate the money to that particular campaign and exchange the promised goods or services. I've promised to cook dinner involving tasty meatballs from horse meat and serve one of my wine bottles to whoever decides to donate 25 EUR. (disclaimer: I'm a good cook and love wine more than code).
SMShelp is an aggregator of donation campaigns via SMS which are very popular in the country but lack a central repository for all of them. A simple web site, live Android app and wonderful design secured the team the first place! BTW Team 8 was Adrian and Vihren who took part in all previous editions as well.
TODO
I'm glad both organizers and teams had listened to some of my feedback but there are still things to improve. The most obvious one was that a quick communication channel to all the teams is needed. Facebook and email just didn't cut it.
I already have couple of quick ideas involving Django and Twilio's cloud services. Let me take a few more days to get it clear before going any further.
/me
I found myself mentoring as much as I could helping folks with Django or just with general ideal or concepts, serving cake provided by Chaos Group and opening stacks of energy drinks, going door to door and letting teams know deployment and presentation details for the last day.
What surprised me a bit was that there were many new teams (some involving previous contestants) who were very diverse in their technological background. This presented a challenge to some of them as they had to use a technology which nobody on the team knew very well and had to make a working app with that. One team even changed from Python to PHP in the middle of day 2.
On Sunday I was pretty much helping the HackFMI team with whatever I can, checking on my favorite teams from time to time and giving access to cloud servers left and right to people who needed them.
Unfortunately I missed the Grand Finale due to unexpected hardware problems involving big iron and 150 litters of loose water :(. See you next time!
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