My First Hackathon

Team Imacoustic / BeCode

Two days ago, I attended my first Hackathon organised by Wallifornia MusicTech. Who would ever have believed it? Two months ago, I barely knew what coding was.

Despite a difficult start, our team finally managed to carry out a project beyond our expectations called Imacoustic. Imacoustic is a platform that generates a sound/music based on an image (artist’s picture/album/etc).

As learners and curious minds, we arrived there without any concrete idea and we quickly felt overwhelmed by the expectations and the quality of other candidates. In such a new environment, the most important is to overcome his own fears and to stay motivated, dixit Cédric Swaelens (C.O.O @BeCode). We want to thank Cloudinary’s representatives, Dan & Tamas, for guiding us throughout this 24 hours challenge.

“In such a new environment, the most important is to overcome his own fears and to stay motivated”

Organisers and participants

What were our biggest challenges:

• Communication: overwhelmed by the lack of preparation beforehand, we had a problem of communication between team members. We realised it is quite complicated to share clear tasks between 7 people.
• Music industry: some of us are very interested in the music industry, nonetheless we are not experts, nor musicians and this probably put us in a more complicated position.
• Delimitate our project: ideas streamed in from every direction and it took us time to be realistic about our project’s feasibility

What we learned:

• Preparation is key.
• Hackathon proceedings
• Work in a big group, tasks sharing
• Challenge ourselves in a delimited period of time
• Integrate API’s from Cloudinary, Youtube & LastFm in our code.
• Work more, sleep less! (not efficient for all of us)

Presentation of our product

From a personal point of view, I realised the importance of excelling yourself and banishing your dark thoughts from your mind. All the group will be impacted by a lack of motivation.

I also feel more and more comfortable with public speaking and other people’s judgments (that was no easy job!).

I am still as passionate as I was about music industry and would love to work in this field.

Thank you Be Code for this new way of learning and opportunities you offer to your learners! And thank you teammates (Romain, Geoffrey, Colombe, Mery, Guillaume & Cédric) It was worth it!