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Getting ready for a hackathon at home

Our ambassadors continue to reveal the secrets of their victory or share life hacks. We asked last year's finalist Vyacheslav Fokin (slavuntik), do I need to prepare for a hackathon and how to do it? Spoiler: you must prepare! And read more in our material.



Registration for the new season of the Digital Breakthrough contest is already open. This year, not only offline hackathons await us, but the online stage is also launching for the first time. A large-scale IT marathon, which consists of as many as two online hackathons and an online championship. Online hackathons will help you prepare for full-time competitions, but you should also prepare for an online hackathon in advance. For us, representatives of the IT community, online is more likely not a bug but a feature, and indeed, for programmers and designers, this is a completely normal mode of operation, especially for introverts. You can stay at home in your favorite chair, and access to the refrigerator is limited only by your own desire and the contents of the refrigerator rich in the inner world .



The influence of self-isolation on the working form of proud representatives of the IT community


Still, the hackathon is quite a serious test, which is useful to be fully equipped, so we will try to extrapolate the existing experience of participation in new realities. We’ll think about how you can prepare in advance for a hackathon and tune in as a sporting event.

The most important thing here, as in any business, is the team. The team must work effectively together, and here you can and should train, organizing the workflow in advance, eliminating the eternal conflict of fathers and children of managers, designers and programmers. Everyone must clearly understand who the boss is.who does what and why it is needed. In small working groups, such as a hackathon team, this is especially important, since our main enemy is not other teams and participants, but time! By the way, online hackathons will be 36-hour, it is much easier than 48-hours (only one night remains sleepless, theoretically, you can’t sleep at all, except for the person who will make the presentation).


Textbook illustration on who is who in a team

How to choose a case


So, we do not know the tasks (this is the main and strictest secret of the organizers). But the directions in which the work will be carried out are known and public. I advise you to choose directions based on available human and professional resources. Suppose you don't have a 3D graphics specialist or a UNITY / Unreal engine programmer in your team, so we don’t go into VR or gamification, we don’t have a machine learning specialist or a good analyst - we don’t get into Big Data and AI, etc ... Also you need to choose a case so that you make the most of your previous experience (play on your field). There will be no time to learn!

Workout at home


So, for training we take any case, the more terrible the task sounds, the more interesting!

For example, “Case from RosGazMyasAgroPromBank. To develop a management system for a distributed network of hydroponic farms (grow tomatoes) in the conditions of volatility in the foreign exchange markets. ”


Vertical farms

1. Do we understand the task? Google, arrange a brainstorm.

As a result, we should get answers to the following questions:

How are tomatoes grown? And so it was possible? How do foreign exchange markets affect the value of nutritional composition? Can we compare them with the forecast for tomato sales? What can be controlled here and how? What do we need for this?

A program / bot that analyzes the necessary residues in a stock of nutritious composition, depending on its consumption, the purchase cost of components, the price of Uruguay Peso (for example, we buy there), logistics costs, customs duties and sales forecast for our tomatoes (we sell in Mozambique for dollars) .

An approximate algorithm of work. The irrigation controller is the mixture regulator (platform, operation algorithm, you can not do it on the hackathon, just explain how it will work and how much it will cost!), A WEB interface and a mobile application to manage it all, set up settings and monitor it. Server software

2. Can we make software illustrating the principle of our system and will we be in time for the hackathon?Are there any analogues, refs? Are there any ready-made datasets with test data (in such cases, the task manager usually provides them).

Yes, yes, and yes again.

3. How effective is our decision, what benefits will it bring? Can we use it (with minor modifications) in other sectors of the agricultural sector? Can we provide our subscription solution as a service?

Yes. The output should be specific numbers. The implementation of our solution, costing n rubles, will save the customer x rubles for y years. The license for our system can be sold, the market is M rubles per year.

If we have a clear and positive answer to all the questions, we divide the task into small parts, distribute it among the team members (saw software), prepare a presentation and a speech in defense of our project. When setting goals, you must first use the SMART methodology .

Tools that make life easier on the hackathon


I will pay special attention to the tools that should be used on the hackathon. KANBAN boards, ticket management systems on the hackathon should not be used (of course, if you cannot live without them and everyone is used to it, then no problem)! Firstly, we have only one sprint, secondly, a small team, a short period of time, therefore tools come to the fore according to the principle “the simpler the better”:

  • Mindmeister (everything that is invented is written in the Mind Map and detailed)
  • Microsoft 2 do (Wunderlist ) –
  • Figma – ,
  • Canva –
  • Telegram Zoom –
  • Excel Google sheets – forever


Writing code is a time-consuming process, so you don’t need to write it for training purposes (programmers can program this way). It is advisable to prepare a node or server, generally infrastructure, where you will deploy your decision and develop CI (continuous integration).

Proper planning of tasks and their decomposition, setting goals for SMART together with programmers (abandoning fullstack development), the main thing that should be trained to prepare for the hackathon. It is necessary to maximally parallelize their implementation so that the team works as a single organism. The main thing to remember is that for success everyone is equally important: programmers, managers, designers, and analysts.

The main thing is that each member of the team knows his role, and all together you go to a common goal.



Good luck to everyone in the contest!

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