What I learned from the YB Hackathon

Last Friday and Saturday I was a participant at the YB Hackathon. What did I experience and what did I learn?

Football and Tech

I've been a huge football (a.k.a. soccer) fan ever since I was a young girl. For me football is the most beautiful and interesting sport and I try to watch a game at the stadium of my favourite football team at least once a season. So the combination of football and tech gets me really, really excited. Obviously I simply had to take part at the YB Hackathon which was organized by isolutions AG and the football team BSC Young Boys. To make the whole thing even more fun, the hackathon took place in the Stade de Suisse football stadium.

Our international team

I was part of one of the two Be Like Grace women's team. Right before we started hacking away, the organizers of the hackathon asked if our all-women's team would let two Peruvian students join us who had flown to Switzerland to take part at the hackathon. We agreed and changed our team name from Tech Queens to Tech Queens Plus. Our team members brought the following know-how:

• Abel: Computer Science student
• Andrea: UX Designer
• Chanel: former fullstack developer
• Daniela: Business Analyst
• Mauro: Computer Science student
• Sombra: Senior Software Engineer

The Double Diamond Model

Andrea suggested we use the Double Diamond Model to support us with the creative process of coming up with a solution for the SUVA challenge we were working on. Here the original quote from SUVA:

Develop a new digital tool to prevent accidents on Swiss football pitches. The focus should be on the engagement of as many amateur football players as possible (club and leisure) with gamification elements.

Once we decided on what the app prototype should be, Andrea started creating the screens we would be programming. Daniela was busy providing background information and putting together the presentation for our final pitch.

The new tech stack

In the meantime Abel and Mauro started working on the frontend design of our web application. Sombra and I were feeling courageous and decided to try out the tech stack that was provided by Microsoft, who were one of the sponsors of the hackathon. Since neither Sombra nor I had ever worked with Microsoft Azure the whole setup process took us longer than we expected.

In the end we used the following tech stack:

• HTML, CSS & JavaScript animations
• Bootstrap
• Pug.js
• Node.js
• Express.js
• PostgreSQL
• Microsof Azure

It's time to pitch!

As I love presenting in front of an audience, I volunteered to hold our pitch before the judges and the other participants. I was unusually nervous as I didn't want to let my team down and was hoping, that the live demo would work out fine. The pitch was over in under 5 minutes and there were no technical challenges. Here some screenshots from our app:

My learnings

What did I learn from this 24-hour hackathon?

• Prepare your tech stack - We lost lots of time because we didn't have any experience with the tech stack we chose. Having worked as a Ruby on Rails developer, I'm used to having Rails do a lot of "magic" for me. But with the tech stack we chose, we had to do more ourselves, which inevitably cost us more time. So next time, I want to define beforehand what tech stack we're going to use and get experience in using it.
• Get yourself a UX designer - It was great that with Andrea we had a UX designer. While she was busy creating beautiful screens we were able to concentrate on the technical setup. So for the next hackathon I definitely want to have a UX designer on board.
• Learn as much as you can - I was lucky to work with Sombra who's a Senior Software Engineer specialized on backend development. Just watching her come up with solutions was awesome and a huge learning opportunity for me. I think it's great to collaborate with someone who has a different skillset than yourself or simply much more experience than you do.
• Get enough sleep - It was reasonable that after 14 hours of hacking I called it a day and went to sleep. I know that some of the participants worked through the entire 24 hours but that wouldn't have been possible for me. So for future hackathons I plan on getting some rest and continuing hacking the next day.

All in all the hackathon was a great experience as I had lots of fun and met new and interesting people. As Arnold likes to say: "I'll be back!"

Here a short video of the hackathon.