I attended Milamber Digital’s Winter Hackathon over the weekend, along with colleagues from our UX Design team, Mark Goddard and Simon Scott.
The theme of the competition was ‘apps for the games’ and as participants we were tasked with designing and developing a prototype app for tourists visiting the Olympic Games. The categories included; event finders, travel planners and, walks and tours, amongst other ideas, and all had to be completed in under two days.
This is my diary of the weekend
After an overnight stay in Luton on Friday, an early 6am start saw us set off for Camden, London. We arrived at 8.30am in time for the sponsor’s presentations to start.
By 1pm the introduction and presentations were over and we were ready to start spec’ing out our app. Unfortunately at this point we found out that two of the other teams were already building apps similar to our original idea, so we had to start working on something new.
An hour or so later we’d defined our new app, a ‘social compliment’ app with which users can predict the outcome of various events and gain points, depending on the accuracy of their guess work. The game can be played with friends with a points leader board created and medals awarded to the highest scorers. The time was about 4pm and we had some serious catching up to do. Simon and Mark quickly started designing the user journey whilst I worked on Git and App Harbor – our version repository and hosting services. We then started to build the app.
By about 8pm we were collaborating well on the code and had all the basics of the application set up so we decided to head out for something to eat. Our restaurant of choice was Cagney’s, selling dishes such as “The Dirty Rat” and the “Oklahoma Kid”.
A good meal, 8 cans of red bull and a quick motivational talk was all it took for us to get back underway after dinner. We worked solidly for several hours populating the data, integrating Facebook and merging the templates and back end code.
At 2am we were starting to flag so decided to pack up and go back to the hotel for some sleep.
We returned to the hackathon around 9am on Sunday and started work again immediately. The app presentations were at 3pm so we frantically pieced together the remaining parts of the working prototype, prepared a presentation and did a final deploy to App Harbor ready for the demo.
The presentation went well and we were very proud to be awarded first prize in the “Best Commerical Idea” category, particularly considering the high standard of our competition.
Our photographs from the weekend are also available.
