My first Remote Hackathon be like 🤓

Once upon a time, when COVID changed the ways of the world, something interesting happened at SAFE Security. It was a fine Friday evening, we were waiting for the day to get over and suddenly an announcement came in: “We are excited to announce the 50 hours hackathon on Securing Cloud”.

Honestly, my first thought was that how will this even be possible in a remote working environment because we all can agree that the basic factor of a hackathon is sitting with colleagues late at night, coding, and thinking about what to eat. But given that I was desperately looking for the change, I decided to participate without giving it a second thought and…. without a topic to participate with.

So the mind was made up, I just had to search for the likes of me who were not in my scrum team, thanks to the rule of Hackathon. After almost a year of Work from home and fewer interactions inter teams, the first option I had was to team up with my friend and that is exactly what I did and luckily in this entire journey, I made one more friend, the third member of our team “Nimbus” ( I know it reminds you of Harry Potter :P )

The next hurdle was the topic that would go with the theme “Securing Cloud”. Well on a higher level there were 3 ways to approach this,

1. To enhance what the product already provides
2. To build something new that can be integrated with the product
3. The cocktail of 1 and 2

Obviously, it was not as easy as it sounds. We aimed to build a POC that would sell itself. We had several ideas but we kind of struggled to put the pieces together. That's where the organizer extended us a helping hand. We discussed all our ideas with the organizing committee and they helped us understand the customer aspect better. Finally, we were down to 2 ideas. The first idea was to integrate something new and the second was the cocktail.

We were the first team to register and the status remained the same for a few days. We were kind of happy about it but not for long. People started registering soon and we started the background work on our ideas. This helped us in knowing the targets that we were looking at in 50 hours. We met several times(obviously on Hangouts cuz WFH) and weighed the work. The cocktail had more work to be done but it was the cure of a big problem that our customers face. So finally we were going ahead with preparing our cocktail but wait…

To our surprise, one other team came up with the same problem statement that too on the day of the Hackathon. That’s when the tables turned and we realized that to win, we will have to come up with a working POC and a POC that will have a wow factor. Luckily we already had that differentiating factor in mind, just that now we had to implement it too.

So the day came and the hackathon commenced. While we were worried about the entire project, our organizers already had a plan to entertain us. They created a slack channel #cloud-hackathon-2021 and that channel was the best part of the hackathon. Whenever we got bored, all we had to do was see that channel. It was full of memes, people posting videos, getting on call to watch some random movies, coffee rooms where we could just discuss our ideas with people, and so on. I honestly never thought that I would enjoy a remote hackathon this much. Other than this we were having some crazy FB live sessions just for fun.

Image Source: #cloud-hackathon Slack channel

Coming back to the journey, we started the work and we divided the project as per the area of expertise. One of our team members was completely dedicated to working on our secret ingredient while two of us were setting up the rest of the work i.e. enhancing our current product to work with the new AWS service. We had set up small targets on an hourly basis and we would meet at regular intervals to check the progress. We had a mix of a night owl, early bird, and well me. That's where I think the remote hackathon proved the best. We all got our own comfortable working environment.

After eat, sleep, code repeat we were at the final stage of the Hackathon. We had to wind up our work and prepare for the presentation. The organizers decided to give us a practice session where each team would give them the demo and they would help us improve. We started our presentation and it kind of turned out to be a flop when it came to conveying the efforts we had put in. We realized that to make the maximum impact, we will have to present first to get an edge over the other teams having similar ideas. And so we volunteered for the same. One more thing we realized is that we were tired as hell and so a break seemed to be a good idea and then we met again. We finally managed to make our presentation in a way that in the beginning, we showed a glimpse of our wow factor which was the graphical representation of a major tech stack (we named it Graphite 😬 ), and then slowly drive the presentation towards the details. We practised a lot and 1…2…3.. action!

A glimpse of Graphite

We were the first team to present and when we presented, we could see people’s faces beaming up seeing our hard work. But that was not just true for our presentation. There were 10 teams and each team rocked the floor. The jury had a very hard time deciding the winner(they even asked for extra time). And the best part was that even after such a competition, we managed to bag the second position. Yayyyy!

When the hackathon was over, what I realized is that it was the journey that was refreshing enough to break the monotony of the work environment. We had developed one entire POC in just a few hours! Our Product Managers were kind of surprised seeing the amount of work that each team had done in 50 hours. They were so happy that all the ideas presented by 10 teams were converted into features. That's how fruitful the hackathon was. It brought out each individual's potential who participated and proved that talent is just flowing all around. We were all in our niche competitive form and what else can be a better opportunity to make you feel like a developer at heart again!