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Hackathon for 200 people - what you need to organize



Do you know why projects in large companies are done half a year? Because one of the slowest processes is communication with the customer to identify details of his needs. A simple clarification of the specification (for nails or glue must be fixed) can take up to three months. Of course, I’m exaggerating somewhat now, but the reality is that you can almost never just take a letter or call and get a direct answer. We must wait for all of the holidays and gather a meeting.

The second feature of the sphere is that in order for automation to start, it is necessary for the customer to know that this can be automated in principle. And he understood, cheaply or not. Given the speed of technological development (especially neural network detectors), some things go beyond the ideas of experienced industrialists, and some become much cheaper and more affordable. But the task of writing them from scratch is not posed.

We understood this and understood the leadership of SIBUR, our powerful industrial partner, who helped with the organization and organization of the hackathon. It was necessary to eliminate the gap between what has already been done and what can and should be done on automation. To do this, we decided to put together four sides on one site at once:

  1. The largest industrial companies in the country.
  2. Technology vendors from changing markets.
  3. Young developers.
  4. IT engineers with experience in the field or in specific technologies needed.

The point is that large companies come with their tasks, and developers at such hackathons try to show a concept of their solution. If all is well, they get a contract on the basis of which you can establish a company. Customers, however, spend two or three days of their time answering questions, but they get a very good picture of the technologies and many prototypes of solutions at once.

Here is a report on the tasks and their solution. But the post itself will be about how we organized the event - perhaps this will be useful to you for your hackathons.

The authors of the tasks were:


  • Gazprom Neft.
  • PhosAgro.
  • Sibur Holding.
  • Nornickel.
  • Uralmekhanobr (part of the UMMC).
  • Rusagro.
  • MARS.
  • ChTPZ.
  • FM logistic.

Actions


Big touches:

  1. Talk with current customers and collect the first tasks.
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A lot of time was spent collecting tasks. A brief template was filled out (below will be the details), our experts asked additional questions, then the task was published. When registering, participants selected one or more tasks and sent approaches to the solution. At the entrance we understood how many teams and what tasks we planned to solve. Approved participation according to the scheme: one team solves one problem. We made a selection in advance based on those descriptions of the solutions that were sent by the teams - so that the event would have those who have a chance of piloting the customer.

A team of mentors is very important. At first, mentors and the customer were asked questions about the problem, then they asked questions about the application of specific things from the technological stack, and then they collected feedback from them on the solution. As practice has shown, to show a wireframe in the middle of a hackathon and get feedback (or even do it a couple of times) is much more important than achieving an impeccable technological solution. Because the customer is definitely better versed in his field and can say something that will drastically shift the solution development process. In the case of determining the marriage of chocolates on the conveyor, it turned out that instead of identifying the ideal model of the bar, it is more expedient to use additional training of the model on defective options and gradually reduce the percentage of false positives.

Submissions


For some tasks, materials and tools were needed. We had a soldering zone, a zone for working with a video stream, power in the cloud. For the soldering zone, a dining room exhaust system was used in case of smoke formation.



Each task had its own set of objects of the material world and software. To control the marriage of chocolates, there were two boxes of a training sample of these same chocolates.

They provided large monitors - some of the participants asked in advance, some asked on the spot. We started a whole quest to search for equipment, and it turned out that on the weekend several dozens of developers gave away from workplaces (on the condition that everything would be in place again on Monday morning), and some were used from the field events fund. Monitors were needed not only for connecting laptops, but also for convenient operation with the Raspberry Pi.

Naturally, it was necessary to provide people with food. We need hotter things (it was prepared by our dining room, everything went right there), snacks and drinks, and dinner with pizza and beer for the finale. Our mistake was that for snacks we used the wrong data from other hackathons, where there were a lot of sweets and pastries, but almost no vegetables and fruits.

Snack menu: cottage cheese, oatmeal and nut cookies, meringues, soft drinks, fruit drinks, fresh apples. Breakfast: cottage cheese pancakes, crepes with sauces (sour cream, fruit, condensed milk), chicken sandwich, ham and cheese sandwich, yogurt. Lunch: meatballs with potatoes in a rustic way, chicken noodles, fish croquettes with fries, grilled chicken with potatoes, noodles with vegetables, pink salmon sticks with potatoes. For dinner, there were beef burgers and french fries, chicken quesadillas. Also, many disposable tableware are included in the purchases for the convenience of catering.

In the snacks we have 11 types of chips, juices, chocolates and chocolate bars, corn sticks, chokopai, Cola Zero, Cola, Sprite, juices, five types of crackers.

The room is part of our dining room office, furniture, respectively, from there, from the furniture store for outdoor events and from conference rooms. For the rest of the participants, our field engineers (those people who sometimes spend the night in the server rooms or nearby) recommended 30 air mattresses - they were purchased, it came in handy.

They also made merch (t-shirts and hats) and a bunch of different small things like badges, passes, sticker packs (including for Telegram) and so on.


These were T-shirts

And sticker packs:


It turned out to be a very good idea to make documentation in advance - memos for task authors, jury members, technical partners: what can and should be done, where are the schedules, all the resources and phones.

There were many video calls and conf calls with customers in front of the hackathon, at the event the chats in the cart were added to them - two task authors could not come and answer questions, and then gave feedback remotely (nevertheless, our industry is concentrated, mainly not where you can get quickly from).

Technological Vendor Stack


Vendors brought their hardware or gave their licenses to those who solved the corresponding problems. That is, it was possible to use or not use the solutions of the vendor, but if you suddenly did not take a carbon dioxide sensor from the house for the mine task, it will be in place.

PERGAM provided a set: gas leak sensors, Raspberry Pi (2 pcs.), 5 volt cooler (Fonsoning FSY50S05H 5V 0.25A 50 X 50 mm), bipolar domestic transistor KT863A, constant resistor 1 kOhm 0.25 W - 3 pcs., mounting wires MGTF 0.25 sq. mm - approximately 3 m, a set of tools for cutting and stripping wires - 3 sets, flux, solder, heat-shrink tubes, soldering stations: Ersa Digital 2000A - 2 pcs., CT Brand CT-936 - 1 pc., Power Bank - 3 pc. ., cylinder CO.

If participants needed cloud power, participants could order virtual machines with the necessary characteristics. Access was granted to the virtual resource management console in the same way as regular commercial users. There were templates with software vendors. Machines - Intel Xeon Gold 6244 Processor, of course, the configurations with 32 cores and 256 GB of RAM and with flash drives for 10 thousand IOPS were the most popular. In total, six accounts were opened and 20 virtual machines were involved. For the participants working with the video, we purchased GPU-machines on Amazon. There Tesla V100 c 16 GB of graphics processor memory, eight virtual CPUs and 61 GB of RAM. Six such machines were used.
We also provided access points, cameras, Raspberry Pi with software for video recognition.

Bitfurygave access to the Exonum blockchain framework - this is a way to quickly organize everything you need on the blockchain. In fact, you can treat the blockchain system as a normal database through the Bitfury libraries.

BellSoft provided a solution for collecting, analyzing and managing data based on NVIDIA Jetson Nano and Raspberry Pi 4, on which the development environment for launching Java applications was preinstalled - Liberica JDK.

Ciscogave Cisco VSM. The solution allows everyone to receive a video stream without problems. VSM collects video streams at its server capacities, saves, processes, if necessary, and gives out to everyone with a slight delay. At the same time, you can increase productivity, in contrast to video surveillance performance, if the demand for video stream increases. The stream can be stored on servers and viewed later. You can connect external sensors or an ACS controller for a more detailed analysis of what is happening near the camera and create all kinds of alerts. In general, a very good platform for working with video - it was just planned to be installed in a pigsty.

Informing


We contacted specialized journalists and sent out press releases, plus announced the hackathon in various publications and on sites (including Habr). CNEWS, RISKNEWS, TB FORUM, RUBEZH, Kommersant (!), Metal Supply and Sales, Magazine of the Chief Engineer, Automation in Industry, Automation and IT in Power Engineering, Automation and IT oil and gas industry ”, the journal“ Labor Protection ”, Neftegaz.RU. Participants were invited to CNEWS, vc.ru, Habré, tproger.ru, ict2go.ru and from partners. The results of the hackathon were published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, here is a report on Habré, and almost all the media mentioned above mentioned it.

It was very important that our employees shared the announcements of the hackathon on Facebook, and that we used our own social networks: one way or another, the news reached many who either were directly interested or knew those who were interested.

The specialized universities were separately informed by letters, but this almost yielded no result.

They were announced by partners - at meetings of the jug.msk.ru developer community, at partner hackathons, for example, Hack.Moscow and Vkontakte Hackathon.

Announcements were in thematic telegram channels for development and in many telegram chats of events where we participate one way or another, or which were sponsored either by us or by one of the key participants.

The authors of the tasks were searched through three main channels: through direct contact through client directors (these are existing CROC customers), published in industry media and launched targeted ads on Facebook / Instagram. The most important thing for them was to quickly test a hypothesis and get a plan for the price and timing of implementation.

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Team


  • Project Manager (it's me).
  • Hackathon curator and jury chairman (technical expert) - we had Sergey Strelkov, CROC software development director.
  • Timlid mentors to coordinate the member support team, Andrei Kogun.
  • Mentors (leading developers, team leaders and engineers, they were also on the jury) - seven people.
  • Three event managers for organizing everything and logistics (people with a love of adrenaline).
  • A separate role is for working with partners and sponsors.
  • PR manager to inform.
  • Internet marketer and content marketer for announcements and promotion in social networks (Vkontakte, Facebook, Instagram - there were even video messages from the organizing team), the creation of the site.
  • Leading the opening and leading awards.
  • Technical Support Officer.

Contractors provided zone development (stands of customers, vendors, etc.), equipped an entertainment zone (we had slot machines, giant jenga, curling, etc.), lighting, and catering.

results


350 applications. 200 participants. 150 of them in 38 teams reached the final of the hackathon. These are participants from Moscow, Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Izhevsk and other cities. The EmptySet team from St. Petersburg State University won the nomination "The best student team", having solved the task of Gazprom Neft to create a program for identifying analogues of shut-off and control valves. For most task authors, this was the first experience of participating in hackathons, for example, for the Chelyabinsk Pipe Rolling Plant (ChTPZ).

Managing such projects is always the work of a large team. Several components are important here at once: task planning, a flexible approach to their implementation (the Agile principle is our everything), the appointment of those responsible, the timing and milestones in the project. For project management, we used Jira.



I think we will continue to participate in the organization of such hackathons - it turned out to be very useful both for the authors of the problems and for the participants. Which, in general, is important for the Russian IT market.

References


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