Women Driven Development — Tech it Forward Hackathon
This is the first Hackathon I ever attended and I was so excited as I had heard many great things about them. That it is a creative event, a great way to collaborate and meet lovely people who share the same passion for tech. I also thought that teams would have a set task and every team would work towards that and that everyone needed to know how to code. As I found out there were a wide variety of projects and non-techies were often just as valuable.
The theme of this particular Hackathon was tech driven development and ultimately teams came up with apps, programs and more to make improvements in peoples lives. Teams chose to focus on particular problems that they have experienced or have familiarity with and came up with a wide array and their appropriate solutions. The demos of each team can be viewed in the video at the bottom of the blog post, but to summarise two teams focused on the mental health of children, two teams focused on creating bots and programs to deal with stress and impostor syndrome in the work place, another two teams focused on improvements in the lives of disabled people, a further team worked on an improvement for the organisational system of a company and more.
The event was extremely creative both in the coming up with problems and solutions and in the code used itself (or so I have been told). I also found that whilst coding is an important skill to have skills of presentation and problem solving were also very important and so even if someone (like me) does not know how to code they should attend a Hackathon and can make important contributions. It was also a relief to see that all these talented techies still struggled with getting their presentations to work just like I would. At the event there was a lot of interaction, which was slightly contrary to how I imagined it, in my mind people are slouching over tables furiously typing, and while there was certainly some of that there was still plenty of time for chatting and meeting new people, even before the day was concluded.
I cannot convey how inspired I felt leaving the event. Not only were the ideas, their completion and presentation awesome, but after the event concluded I got a chance to talk to the women that participated. They were some of the most supportive people I have ever met and they all said great things about each other, the event and showed that working collaboratively achieves a lot more than always competing with each other. Competition often ends up putting some people down and here it was clear that everyone working together brings out the best in teams.
I also felt that a lot of the ideas focused on solving mental health problems and problems that in general would be much smaller if we just paid a little more attention to each other and were nicer to one another. However, it is awesome that now there are projects out there which solve everyday problems, and I hope the teams develop what they made further.
Mostly, I cannot wait to participate in a Hackathon and check out the video below to get an idea of the atmosphere of the event.
