A Night at a Hackathon; Experiences from the DroidCon HackNight
The second edition of DroidCon is just around the corner and in typical DroidCon Fashion, the second HackNight was held over 27th and 28th of October,
a week before the event. HackNight is an overnight hackathon with Android app development as its theme. Programmers across the whole spectrum of the Android community came together for one night to make apps over the night and I had the good fortune of being in their midst.An Endurance Test
It truly was a test of endurance for the developers, but they came good after a night of intense coding, 9 really cool apps surfaced. Fighting sleep and fatigue, the organizing team from HasGeek had stacked up the venue with enough eats and drinks as respite. With cozy couches and bedding, it provided the developers with all the more incentive to doze off, but each team persevered. At the end of the HackNight, with bleary, bloodshot eyes and tired voices, the teams proudly presented their apps before heading off home for a well deserved sleep.
Some Cool Apps and Some Cooler People
Apps across various categories were made; from educational apps such as one that teaches the alphabets to kids to financial apps that tracks the areas that you spend the most amount of your money via SMSs from your bank; such was the diversity of the crowd that came to the HackNight. The people at the Hack were even more amazing. Some marketing officers were at the HackNight as well. Ravi Vyas, who works as a developer advocate at Vserv said “You won't believe how happy I am now. I'm actually coding after months and its a great feeling!”
Programmers as celebrated as Satyam Kandula from Little Eye Labs and Himanshu Sharma, a core developer from the Liquid Smooth ROM group were also at the HackNight. It was great exposure for the students and novices among the gathering of developers and the informal environment at the Hack was conducive to frequent interactions from which they derived huge value.
A Feeling Of Community
Amrit Sanjeev, a research engineer from Philips said “You will find that most guys here really don't care about the business aspect of their software and they're here just to do things because they can and want to. Its more about solving the problem for developers. And thats what the community is all about. People get together to solve a problem, without any regard for recognition. This is less in India and events like these help make that better.”
One app was from a team which didn't know how to code! These were a couple of design and marketing guys, but the team successfully made an app with guidance from the programmers in house. This pretty much summed up the HackNight for me; Coding, Community and a lot of fun!
Were you there at the HackNight? Feel free to share your experience in the comments section below. If you weren't, don't worry! You can relive the same experience at DroidCon India.
