Done with my Latest Hackathon Project

This week I have had the pleasure of participating in a Hackathon for work. Unfortunately I can't describe my project as we have been asked to keep them secret until after the judging has completed. Six months ago, I didn't worry about sharing my project as it did not relate to my job at Sony PlayStation at all. This project is actually a good idea that would benefit the company as a new product idea as well as being a good corporate citizen. Perhaps in the future I can point to an actual product or service and say that started as my simple project.

As with the Hackathon 6 months ago, this one ended up being completely virtual. That means I spent a large amount of time getting video of myself building the project. When you have to plan everything you do around a video camera, it really slows down the work. I also had to take time to create the 4-minute video that will be used to judge my project. I started this morning at around 11am and the video still isn't complete. Fortunately I am rendering the video and just waiting for iMovie to spit out the file that I will upload to the judges tomorrow morning. It has been rendering for the past hour and I hope it completes shortly.

Creating a 4-minute video is incredibly difficult if you want to do it correctly. For starters, there is so much to say about the project that it is tough to keep it under 4 minutes. I had to leave a lot of the details out. Some of those details are what makes the project spectacular and so you want to include certain things and then leave others out. Assuming you have all the footage from creating the project, you then have to narrate the process you followed. It took me about an hour to get all of my audio recorded. Then I had to sync the audio with the video and still images.

I have to confess that I prefer still images over video. If you need an extra second or two, it is easy to add with a photograph. If you have important steps you are showing in a video, you have to make sure the narration matches exactly. There are tricks you can use but it is not as simple as using pictures.

Ultimately I am glad I participated in the Hackathon as I learned a lot. I also had a significant amount of fun and think I did something worthwhile. I hope the judges agree.

The Fun of Hackathons

Last month I got the chance to spend part of a week doing a Hackathon. For those that have never heard of a Hackathon, it is where you work to solve a computer problem over the course of a couple days. My company sponsored the event and so I got to put down my normal work and play with something completely new. We had food brought in so we could continue to work through lunch and dinner. We also had plenty of snacks so we didn't have to worry about eating at all.

I partnered up with a couple of guys I eat lunch with on a daily basis. We all work on different projects in the department and so we picked a problem that was fun to solve and spanned each of our specialties. Unfortunately I can't go into detail on what we did as it may be covered by a non-disclosure agreement I signed when I started working at the company over eight years ago. I can tell you we had a lot of fun and learned some new and useful skills.

If you find yourself wanting to expand your technical abilities, I highly suggest participation in a Hackathon. Then pick a problem to solve somewhat related to your normal work but include other tools or pieces. If you spend all your time working on software, see if you can't work with some hardware kits like Raspberry Pi or Arduino. At my Hackathon, I ended up becoming quite skilled with an electric carving knife, a hot-glue gun, and camping mattress foam. Did I mention I had a lot of fun.