CHIMEHACK — Gucci + Twitter + Women Who Code + UNICEF

WINNERS OF UNICEF CHALLENGE — My first Hackathon Experience

Vinu Charanya

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Journey exploring Tech World

6 min readDec 14, 2013

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Gucci partnered with Twitter and Women who code and hosted a 3 day hackathon at Twitter office from Dec 5th — 7th 2013(Thursday — Saturday).

I went there on Thursday evening and the event kicked off with a speech from Adam Messenger , Pat Mitchell, few other amazing speakers and with the Chime for Change video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpYqPCcvJe0

I met my friend Nikita and we were there, with just two thoughts in our mind. We are not participating to win, but we are participating to just have fun, support the cause to help women and children and to meet our fellow women geeks ☺.

We met with the NGO’s of different challenges to set our mind on what we wanted to hack. Our interests were on VITAL VOICES and CHIME FOR CHANGE for helping other women, trick or treat a fun app for kids from UNICEF and then UN WOMEN and RIDERS FOR HEALTH.

We ran into Anna and Yasmin. Nikita and I started discussing about the challenges that were interesting to us and Sarah joined us. We got into the discussion and learnt that we all shared the same interest and our team was set. We took another hour and started deciding the theme for our app. That was an exciting start for the first day.

DAY 2 — ONE KING’s LANE

Unfortunately Sarah and Yasmin were not able to make it to the next day and things were not looking good. It was a bit stressful, but where is the fun when things don’t get complicated. Yasmin, introduced us to Mary Ann and Yada. With an all new team, we went through all the challenges again. We started brain storming, discussed the constraints and the skill set of our team. We did mock ups and wire frames for Chime for Change and Trick or Treat App. We discussed about feasibility and challenges involved. It was one of the best hours of the entire hackathon to see different suggestions coming in, helping us visualize our app coming to life.

As I mentioned earlier, since we wanted to have fun, an app with a game to help 7 or 8 year old kids have some extra fun for halloween, made us pick the trick or treat app. With some ideas in our mind about the app, and a lot of imaginations for the game, we left home on Friday with one thought, “We are gonna have so much fun building this!!”

Saturday — When it all happened

I was one of the early birds at Twitter HQ for the hackathon on Saturday and my team members slowly joined me. The overnight thinking and a good sleep gave us a fresh start with ideas that just needed implementation(Still the hard part). I started with the repos, a rails server hosted it, created an Android app skeleton to kick us off. Mary Ann Jawili, Anna Haeger and Yada started with the images and html views for the game. Nikita started with the payment through Paypal for the app. I was working on the backend server, and also creating the other parts and web views for the android app and integrating all into one. At around 4pm, we had a simple game, Paypal integration, twitter integration for the app and we were all set for the demo with some last minute tweaking the looks.

We didn’t want to change the most fun part for the kids for the past 65 years, carrying around the trick or treat box. So we wanted to redesign the box to have the phone and a swipe feature for reading cards along with traditional part of collecting the change or check.

Mary Ann with our redesigned new Trick or Treat boxes

The Demo

We went there on the stage, with the app ready on the emulator. 2 minutes to go. We got so excited, Mary Ann started talking and we explained the idea, but didn’t manage our time to show the entire demo of the app and it was over. I felt so terrible, cribbing every minute, how we did so much and didn’t show it all. My team mates were consoling me, we did good and we showed the demo and we had so much fun. It took me a while to snap out of how I messed up!! (At the end of the day, its the first time,mistakes are good lessons …)

The Results

All the teams finished up.. The judges were ready with their decisions. For the UNICEF challenge Aza Raskin VP of Jawbone and Linda from UNICEF announced us winners with a comment “It was a beautiful example of using an iconic form for the future, and using a brand children are already familiar with.” It took us a while to realize it was us, who won. We all were in shock, our first hackathon and we won!! Then the usual, photos, appreciation from others etc.,

From left, Aza from Jawbone, Linda ftom UNICEF, me(Vinu), MaryAnn at the back, Nikita, Anna Haeger at the back, and Yada ☺ Winners!

A good start and a good lesson

I strongly believe there is something good or bad to learn from everything in life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpHRSi0JFKY

I learnt so many good things from this 3 day event by GUCCI. First of all, I had a chance to meet great women leaders from Gucci, Chime for Change, Ted Women and other organizations who were already out there making the world a better place for women and children. This event was a great inspiration to me and I feel proud that I had a chance to be a part of something big in my own way. I wanted to and I will support this good cause in any possible way I can.

Next, about my successful first hackathon with an awesome team Mary Ann, Nikita, Anna and Yada. The most important lesson, team work. Most of us work in a team in our day to day corporate life. How is this different? At a work environment, you were made a part of team and over a period the team slowly comes together. Meeting with random people, forming a team to hack for a cause in 36 hours is way different. So many different opinions were raised. We trusted and valued every single opinion and made decisions as a team. We came together in a short span and stayed together till the end supporting each other and that plays a very important factor in our success. We hacked as a team and we won. If you can do that, work as a team, learn to listen and analyze other’s suggestions, and make or help your team make a uniform decision, that is one of the best traits any engineer can have.

What is Hackathon?

IMHO Hackathon is not about winning, it is not about the competition.. Competitions want you to do better than others, a lot of pressure. But what we did was , try to do our best. We were not after the prize.. we were after our best efforts, fun .. trying to do what we all love to do and I personally liked the cause we hacked on “Solution to support women and children”. After 36 hours, I have 4 good friends, a team, I would look forward to participate with all the amazing events yet to come..