SotonHack — Build 2.0 (Day 3)

Good morning! It’s the last day, let’s go!

Fun fact: some buildings in the campus are designed to look like ships from above.

8:25

Woke up.

8:40

Got out of bed

9:20

Back at the venue, ready to work. Oh look, breakfast!

9:40

I wonder if any of the bugs have fixed themselves over the night…

10:16

I meant to type “start tracking” and instead I typed “stack track”. Clearly, I’m still tired.

11:15

Oh no, just 2 hours and a half left :o :o

13:15

45 mins left 😨

Switching doesn’t work, timers don’t work, rush rush rush…

13:31

Switching works now, I should submit the project to devpost (done) and see what else I can do afterwards.

13:54

Yesss, it works now. I can switch between activities, add more, and remove them.

The final product.

Perhaps I should have mentioned already, the name Switch comes from the concept on which the app is based on—you add the activities you want to track, then to track time you switch between them. One of them has to be selected, always.

14:30

We moved to another room to watch the presentations. Statistically speaking, 23% of the projects involved memes. There were a few games, one VR experiment, and some others. My favourite project (excluding mine, of course) was MovieNarrator, a program that generated movie voice-overs. Every 4 seconds, it extracted a frame then used some ML to generate a text description of the scene (which was then synthesised and played).

One of the funniest ones was a Twitter bot that generated memes from the text you tweeted it:

Also, Meme Generator:

16:40

Time to see the winners!

Some of the prizes. Also, the handsome guys from Bloomberg.

First of all: I won the special prize for sending the funniest snap (of Dyno, the plush toy). Unfortunately, I don’t have it because I forgot to save it before sending it to Sotonhack. But you’ve seen Dyno already.

And the winners are…

1. F1nger — Android puzzle game designed to be played with one finger.
2. Meme Generator — A true revolution. Meme industry hates us. Our generator captures your face and captions it making a new meme!
3. GITar Hero — Play your git logs as music.

You can see all the projects on devpost.

I had a fun time and I hope I managed to share my excitement. I realise that the lack of recent experience with XCode slowed me down a lot, but still—I managed to make a simple app that works. And, in my opinion, it also looks pretty good (it even has animations, because UX matters).

Now, some feedback for the organisers:

• The food was great! I liked the pizza, the chicken grill with rice and chips was delicious, the greek wraps were better than expected, and you even had fruits and carrots (the best snacks).
• I like that you had mini-games planned during the event. Although I usually get really focused when I work on something and don’t want to spend time on anything else, now when I look back I realise that I’d have regretted not playing those games. Great fun in small doses.
• I also like that you brought Bloomberg and MLH. They gave us t-shirts, awesome fridge magnets, and shiny stickers.
• I honestly can’t think of anything I didn’t like.

So, when’s the next one? 😄