Not Your Daddy's Hackathon!

I've been thru maybe 4-5 #hackathons myself, sometimes as a sole participant, sometimes as a collaborator, twice as a consultant to participants and again twice as a jury.

For first timers hearing a?#hackathon, it is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering called #hacking over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours straight the #marathon thus it become a "hacking+marathon".

Should say that it's a thrilling experience meeting with clever minds and cutting-edge ideas (at least some ideas), a great learning experience but also a very stressful 1 or 2 days #sprint. Perhaps more than half of the stress comes from time-boxing the event into a very short time period... We'll get to this in a bit.

They are often run for applying #agile software development practices with the goal of creating a functioning software or sometimes IoT like hardware + software by the time of the deadline.?

Sometimes you may hear about #datathons instead of hackathons, well these are as similar fashion events this time not focused on software development but rather #dataops & #modelops, still using #agile software #devops practices of course.

At this point here is a quick show of what do we mean by #agilesoftwaredevelopment

Remember it like this; waterfall is a big bang project thus a #bigrisk at the very end. If you fail, no way to turn the ship around. Agile is a series of sprints in which if you fail in one sprint you can reiterate that sprint thus very #littlerisk at each sprint and at the very end...

Some other aspect of hackathons is they tend to have a strict focus, hack using #java or #rust or use given #openbanking APIs only or the subject is defined somehow. In #datathons then the data is a given probably with labels or a target.

This creates a little problem because it's very hard to start with an end in the mind. What's a business problem, how big is the size of the prize, what are pain points of end-users etc... This slips way fast, and you jump into development blindly.

However, as I experienced many times, and #Gartner emphasizes this in many papers as well, especially in #Analytics and #datascience you should attack problems from value point first...

Here comes why 赛仕软件 #Hackaathon is not your daddy's hackathon...

First of all this event has a rather long timeline.

• The registration ends on 28th of February (Register here and now), until that time you have to #setupateam (of 2-10 members),
• Think about a valuable use case (you can name this as an #ideathon especially if you analyze the value of multiple ideas and then pick one amongst them)
• Then we start enabling you on top notch technologies thru Jan and February, provide you free e-learnings
• A free Microsoft Azure Cloud #SASViya environment (40 vCPU's or something similar)
• We assign you one or two subject matter experts (like having your #McKinseySolutions or #BCGGamma consultants of your own but for free, like a dream isn't it) regarding the industry you focus...

Oh! By the way here take a look at industry tracks of 2022...

• Then we let you develop with your team for a full month... March 15 – April 15: This is the time to let your creativity shine – use data and SAS Viya to solve your challenge. #R, #Pyhton, #Lua, #Java, #SAS languages like in an all-you-can-eat-buffet! The platform covers all for a reason, pls. see below...

• Also, your IP is your IP. If you have a #changemaker solution and #win, you may have a chance to productionalize it with SAS or if you prefer on your own... (SAS has 90+ offices and a monster sales practice with over 1500 partners Geo distributed around the world so it may be wise to utilize this marketplace, just saying)

Having said all of this, my colleagues @SAS made it into a great video and a rap music so check this out and join us at the hackathon. Looking forward to see you there...

A note to CDO's, CAO's and leaders; for #corporateinnovation days to #hackwithyourteam internally, with your own data, please give me a call...

For #talentacquisiton days to #hackwithprospects and #assess them #onthejob, who ya' gonna call?

All the best

Altan