Hackathon Prime

The dictionary defines the term “Hackathon” as:

     “An event, typically lasting several days, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming.”

There is no scrum meeting, no iteration planning, and no code review. Just plain old writing and compiling code, the most effective way you can. Or in my case the most Open Source way you can.

Hackathons are a lot like marathons. People go to marathons for many different reasons. Some people go because they want to compete at a high level. But most of us take part because we want to improve ourselves, make friends, and have fun. The Cerner BLR OSS Hackathon was exactly what you would expect. Although, I was expecting more of a beer/pizza party after that, but I guess that is too much to ask.

Now frankly I participated because a couple of associates asked me to and I was up to no good at that moment. But leading up to that day, I could see the excitement building up. So it began on Thursday at 4pm and we were presented with our problem statement. I could say, there was a rush within all the participants the moment it happened. So many discussions and murmurs. I was joined by Manu and Poulomi, and we dug right into the ground up approach for the solution. Manu suggested we go for a web application and we went for it.

Now the thing was that I have never worked on a web application before, but seriously, no one that I know has. If you look around you could easily see there is more craze of mobility than it is for content. All that aside, I thought of going with it. Suggestions started pouring in. “Define the entity first”. “Use mongoDB”. “Learn git”. They were all constructive suggestions, though.

Later that evening, I started working on having an initial setup to get that one phrase which, I believe, all developers crave for – “Hello World!” I won’t go into the details of the days following the setup but I can say that it was some of the most grueling moments I have faced while coding. But keeping “Try Harder” as my thought for the day, I pushed forward.

Of all the difficulties I have faced during the event, I can assure you that there will be times where you would be on the verge of breaking, but at that time just remember that the spirit of a hackathon is to plan something big and then to create it. If you are in a hackathon, you are not going to demo your idea, you are going to see it through. At the end of the day if you have created something, rest assured in the fact that you have been successful.