What I learned from the Tanda Hackathon

This guest post was written by Kalina S, a participant at the 2017 Tanda Hackathon.

I always imagined Hackathons to look a bit like a 90’s Lan Party. Turns out, I was wrong.

When I first heard about the Tanda Hackathon 2017, I was excited and unsure what to expect, as I have never been to a Hackathon before. I arrived from Germany as an Business Computing exchange student to Brisbane 3 months ago. One of my friends from my University told me “there is food, drinks and a Tshirt, why wouldn’t you come?” He had a point, so on the 27 October I arrived at the Tanda Headquarters, for the 24 hour hackathon.

I had two advantages on that Friday: I knew Tanda from working as a translator to German for them and did attend the preparation event “How to Hackathon” five days earlier and was able to refresh my memory on Web Development and inform myself about Webhooks.

During the hackathon I learned a lot.
It is very different to be able to set your own goal and to work with a motivated team on a project than to work on an assignment that no one is ever going to see or use. I ended up in a team of five with Computer, Software and Mechanical engineering students.
We started with a small brainstorm around using the Tanda webhooks and ended up with “Funny Monday”. It lets an employee choose a compliment for a colleague and the three people with the most compliments, get a positive feedback on Monday morning.

During the coding phase, I was working in the backend part of our team and first thing I did was develop the basic webhook communication and then the sorting algorithm. We worked pretty much without breaks until it was time for the presentation, but when the time came we weren’t able to connect everything together. What I learned from that, use a whiteboard, write down the tasks, make proper mockups for the frontend and code the interfaces early on.

The presentation was probably my favourite part. Not only was every project very creative and showed the productivity between the coffee breaks, each attendee spoke openly about what they did or in our case what they struggled with.

Even though I didn’t go home with a working solution, I would do it again anytime, because I do have a lot of new knowledge and friends, heard good and bad jokes and had an amazing opportunity to talk and hear about experiences in IT. For me the process is the goal.