I’ve always been a strong believer of Well begun is half done. In that sense, we were very encouraged with the fantastic response to our preliminary orientation session. However, greater challenges lied ahead as our next two events would set the tone for the eventual outcome of our Jaipur Hackathon dream.
A community event is never about individuals, it’s always about how those individuals bond well as teams and thankfully, we were lucky to have the organisers, sponsors and even the participants work as one big team aimed at making the event successful in a fun-filled atmosphere.
How to build a MVP in 24 Hours?
The next milestone was an interactive session aimed at ‘How to build a MVP in 24 Hours’ presented by Jai and Anshul. Hackathons are a great place to brainstorm and validate ideas but it’s not really feasible to have a Minimum Viable Product (aka MVP) in a day or so. Therefore, our definition of MVP actually meant ‘Minimum Viable Prototype’. Personally, I am not very fond of acronyms and other such bullshit so our focus was to explain the concepts with a real world app that was built in less than a day and stay away from the fancy terms.
Technology
We live in a world where technology changes faster than our imagination. It was heartening to see participants open up with all sorts of crazy technology ideas – from developing a camera-controlled Unity 3D game for Kinect to exploiting bugs in Android kernel to come up with interesting security solutions, every idea and technology was welcome. Being a mobile/ cloud evangelist, I really wanted to see a few kick-ass apps leveraging some state of the art frameworks.
Engagement
You don’t educate developers – you interact with them. Over the last 15 years, I’ve learnt that developers are a nasty beast. If you try to teach them, they lose interest quickly. However, if you try and discuss things with them, they’ll mostly oblige. What stood out in the event was how everybody seemed keen on participation and there was no hesitation to ask questions or get involved in a geeky discussion.
Fun
And as they say, there’s nothing better than a smiling audience and cheerful faces.
It made our day. The usual dose of coffee, snacks (how else do you lure folks on a Sunday morning) and interesting conversations followed before we called it a day.
While it’s easy to talk about organising a hackathon, doing it is a different beast altogether. We had less than a week to get our act together and several todos, have nots and other challenges on the way.
More details about our final frontier – the”real thing” in Part 3 coming soon…
Yet Another Salesforce Blog! 