Hackathon ideas

[Juozas]

Hi,

I had a chance to talk to a few people this weekend about possible hackathon* ideas.

One sponsor offered to give us 250 servers, split them per team, so all teams get 10 servers allocated to them. Then they spend the day building an app following some spec in any language, any os, any db etc. aiming for the most robust one. In the evening they would throw their sysops guys at the servers and load test them using a cluster of servers emulating all sorts of things, like drop rates, etc. Whoever manages to stay up longest, has highest req/s, has lowest response time, etc. wins. Wins means there will be a prize.

Another idea was to run a robot competition, where team compete writing AI for virtual robots and playing against each over. Likely this would be virtual robots rather than HW ones as HW would take too much time to learn for folk. Also virtual ones allow to be more flexible in terms of a language. 

These are more fun-aiming ideas rather than practical hackathon.

* Which will most likely happen here http://www.dynamicearth.co.uk/

--
Juozas Kaziukėnas

[Paul Dragoonis]

Good ideas. Thanks for the email.

Will let other people talk about this since we already spoke on the phone.

Look forward to it.

- Paul.

[Juozas]

Anyone?

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Juozas Kaziukėnas

On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Juozas <juo...@juokaz.com> wrote:

[lornajane]

I also saw Joe in person to discuss this but I'll share my thoughts
here for others. I would prefer to have the hackathon go towards
something constructive, allowing people to get together to build
something useful for the community or work on existing open source
projects to add features. To be really honest, the competitive aspect
doesn't appeal to me at all - but then I am not sure I am target
market for this conference in any case.

I am project lead on joind.in, which I think you are planning to use
for the event anyway, and am happy to come and get people involved in
the project. The code is PHP but we also have API stuff that people
can build whatever they want to integrate against (it's JSON-based
RESTful unless you look too closely). I'd especially appreciate some
help with some javascript widgets that we started and then forgot
about, for example, so having the spread of different disciplines
there would be great IMO - we also have iphone and android apps.

Just my tuppence

Lorna

[Dougal Matthews]

> One sponsor offered to give us 250 servers, split them per team, so all
> teams get 10 servers allocated to them. Then they spend the day building an
> app following some spec in any language, any os, any db etc. aiming for the
> most robust one. In the evening they would throw their sysops guys at the
> servers and load test them using a cluster of servers emulating all sorts of
> things, like drop rates, etc. Whoever manages to stay up longest, has
> highest req/s, has lowest response time, etc. wins. Wins means there will be
> a prize.

This sounds more 'webby' which is great, although scaling odd little problems
might not be everybody's cup of tea. You would need to prepare for 50 people
using Apache Bench on the external servers to test what they are doing :)

> Another idea was to run a robot competition, where team compete writing AI
> for virtual robots and playing against each over. Likely this would be
> virtual robots rather than HW ones as HW would take too much time to learn
> for folk. Also virtual ones allow to be more flexible in terms of a
> language.

This could be fun, but it seems a bit off topic almost. Really, it depends what
you are trying to achieve.

Personally I'm more interested in sprints on specific problems and making
progress towards something - new features for language X and/or framework
X and so on.

[Dale Harvey]

Yo

Sorry had a chat about this yesterday while I was heling out a techcube (which could be awesome, possible venue for next year)

For the structure of the event, I think the most reasonable thing is to have a set of ideas for things to be hacked on, ideas that can be done to a working prototype in a day, we need to come up with say 10 of these, at the start we encourage people to submit their own ideas, then form groups of 3/4 and hack them out, People are completely fine work to work on their own ideas or just hang around and do work, but a lot of people are also going to want to be told what to do so we cant just wait for everyone to come up with something 

Its very important that we prepare for a lot of the tasks, for ideas that are "produce a web service around some data" we need to make sure the data is prepared and accessible etc

I dont think the "write software to some spec" sounds particularly appealing, especially when the format looks aimed towards everyone participating in the same task, it just sounds like work, the turnover time for big data processing is way too long for a hackathon as well

A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocode tournament sounded pretty awesome

its basically a game where people write a small algorithm to control a tank, you need to try and not get hit, plus try to hit the other guy, its apparently very quick to learn, and as long as 4/6 people take part then there is a little event that others can watch when they take a break, we would need a screen 

I also like the robots idea, I asked the hacklab guys about it, they said only one guy has a robot and not particularly suited for a hackathon, but they have been talking about running an arduino workshop for software developers, I went to a conference in sweden where they had an arduino workshop and it went down really well, one of those things software developers want to get into all the time but the barrier is pretty high

A friend from pusher is running real time workshops and at a guess would be happy joining in, I also introduced Joe to someone from culture hack who is coming along, joind.in sounds awesome as well, 

So I suggest, we come up with 10 or so ideas, like

 1. Real time Javascript Game

 2. Widget to display spread of disciplines on joind.in

 3. Web service to find and rate cycle paths around edinburgh

 4. Hack an Arduino to do .... 

Then we have a few experts on board who can help coordinate the individual ideas, we make sure we are prepared in terms of data feeds etc

Sound decent?

[Juozas]

I had a chat with someone, will reply with more details later.

Basically he is saying, and I agree, that we need focus and people. For example oss projects should bring their people. Also we need to make it interesting for people to come, not just people sitting with their laptopos getting bored.

--
Juozas Kaziukenas. Sent from my BlackBerry

---

From: Dale Harvey <da...@arandomurl.com>

Sender: scotland-tec...@googlegroups.com

Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:29:32 +0000

To: <scotland-tec...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: scotland-tec...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: Hackathon ideas