eMAG Hackathon 4th edition
Code and fun
Each year eMAG likes shaking things up a bit for its programmers and gives them a challenge: 24 hours to code something amazing, impress the jury and win cool prizes. Of course, nobody codes for 24 hours straight without food, drinks and a bit of relaxation, so as a whole the event is a mix of coding, drinking beer, eating burgers & pancakes, enjoying some Playstation VR and hover boards. eMAG also started to make it sort of a tradition to bring aboard some stand-up comedians to entertain and unwind our tech guys and this year was no different with Dan Badea as our guest entertainer.
eMAG Hackathon #4
So, what were this year’s rules of the Hackathon? Well it’s very simple: Each team had to build a project from a few themes that we picked out taking into account the general trends of the tech environment. As technologies we chose the usual suspects — Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and the Internet of things.
Now, keeping in mind the technologies used for programming, each team had to fit their projects into a theme, from a list that we made up:
- Improve customer experience in the showrooms or at home
- Improve payment method for the showrooms, web or mobile
- Improve the buying experience on mobile, application or web
- Improve delivery and warehouse logistics efficiency
Special for geeks:
- Improve development workflow
- Improve software product quality
- Improve infrastructure
- Improve day to day work
There was a total of 16 teams competing for the categories of:
- Best Hack
- Most innovative project
- Customer and user experience
- Project with the best code
- Most popular project
It was very exciting to see everyone engaged in the Hackathon and doing their best to impress the judges who were visiting the team every now and again, checking up on their progress. Well, they had to pick the winners, didn’t they?
On Sunday, in front of a large audience, all the teams had to present their projects and try to prove the worth of their projects to the judges one last time before the winners were picked. There were a lot of nervous speakers giving their best pitch of their hard work.
And drum roll the winners are… :
For the Best Hack: Team Undefined Variables with the project "Big Brother"
Most innovative project: Team CodeWhisperers with the project "Convergence"
Customer Experience: Team TheBigDatawski with the project "Big Data, Fast Data"
Best code: Team MonA with the project "Monitoring Assistant"
Most popular project: Team 2 Hour Commute with the project "Mr.eBot"
You’ll learn more about each project in our following articles, right here, on eMAG TechLabs. I bet you are curious to learn more and what set them apart from all the rest, especially considering that all the projects were very cool, and everyone worked very hard.
The event was a big success with smiles all around and a big round of applause for the winners. Everyone was tired at the end but it was all worth it as the Hackathon is a great experience and if nothing else, it brings teams together and sparks their creativity.
For more pictures, go here and follow us, because we’re preparing something cool to show you more about this year’s edition.
If you want to be a part of one of the teams next year, check our openings, on our careers page.
