Last weekend I attended Launch Hack, a hackathon for students organised by MLG. This was the first hackathon I have ever attended and it was a fantastic experience. My two friends Nali and Ivaylo joined me and together we were to build a project in 24 hours. We also recruited a fourth team member called Ong Cher Wei from Glasgow. 

While Nali remarked he was going to attend it to learn from other people and enjoy complimentary food and drinks, I was determined to make the 24 hours worthwhile. We came up with the idea to build an web application, since our most combined programming expertise was in PHP. I thought that we should solve a problem that has been on the internet since its launch: Broken links. 

We all know what it's like to want to see a video that has been shared numerous times on the internet, only to be disappointed to find out its deleted. Well what our application would do is to use reddit to search for mirrors. The reason for that is, that in the comments, the users are always keen to provide mirror links to other users for karma (upvotes).

Well since I have had expertise with the Reddit API (with x-posting and r/delay) a very basic prototype of this web-app should be no problem. Since I had the most experience out of our entire group and came up with the idea, I was called to be the leader.

In the beginning, I had the task to not only start coding the base, but to also assign things to do to my team-members. One of them, Ivaylo, had done some php in the past so I thought of giving him the task to connect the reddit api to our app. On Cher only had experience in Visual Basic, so he his task was to build an html template which we could serve the information on. 

Unfortunately, one hour into the hackathon, my HP laptop broke down and refused to start up again. This was captured by the organisers and put on twitter.

After we shared a few laughs, Nali graciously offered me his macbook so that we could actually get some work done. He went on to assist On Cher with the task of building the html template and researching more of how we could get other sources of mirror sites.

Around 5 hours in, we had built a basic file structure and the html template was looking great. Unfortunately, the heart of the whole web-app, the reddit integration, was not looking so well and it set us back by about 4 hours. During these 4 hours we were frustratedly wondering why reddit kept wanting to for us to log in and allow permissions. After figuring out what we wanted was the basic mode instead of the oauth mode and some tinkering, we finally managed to get it running. 

After that, I took over integrating the reddit api into our project, while Ivaylo had the task of handling broken links which were not submitted to reddit. This process was tedious as I had to parse my way through all the arrays and stdobjects in php to get to what we really wanted: the comments. 

In between working we had a good time eating delicious food and drinks catered by Bloomberg and occasionally playing New Super Mario Bros for Wii U. The presentation room was changed into the sleeping room at night and I had a comfortable good sleep, even though it was only for two hours.

The next morning we did all the finishing touches to the web-app and we were surprised and delighted to see it actually working. When it came to the presenting, me and Ivaylo were to present about how our application worked in 2 minutes time. We were incredibly nervous, but we managed to do a pretty good job. The presentation can be viewed here, but please keep in mind that we only had 2 hours of sleep in the past 2 days.

In conclusion, this hackathon was one of the best experiences in my life so far, and even though we didn't manage to win any prizes, we received a goodybag containing some pretty awesome swag!

We were thrilled when Launch asked TheFingo to caffeinate their hackathon last weekend at the Metreon Center. After chatting with Luke Lightning a few times over some cocktails, we jumped at the opportunity to brew coffee for the 1000+ hackers who vied for the million dollar investment. The event made sense for us because brewing free coffee is our best marketing.

We had three main Goals for three days of supplying everyone with coffee at the event.

1. Introduce ourselves and our roasters to potential customers

2. Generate buzz on social media

3. Obtain warm leads

Here’s how we did it:

One Ninety Seven Coffee Roasters came through in the clutch to power Friday night throughout Saturday afternoon. When he needed a break, our good friend Tim Watts stepped in as the substitute Barista Master, and he did an incredible job. For those more inclined to cold coffee, Flux Coffee hooked up a Kegerator filled with cold brew throughout the first two days. 

On Sunday, Tico Roasters finished the event strong with their special Oktoberfest brew.

And of course, there’s no better way to compliment your coffee than with a sinfully delicious wafel cookie crafted by Rip Van Wafels. Rip himself joined us, making sure to neatly place a wafel on every cup we could fit on the table.

We ran out of cream, which is why you see the whipped cream. It is a hackathon, after all.

Here’s the breakdown of how we approached each day of the hackathon.

The first day was about introducing our suppliers and their caffeinated treats, as well as ourselves as “the coffee guys”. People were excited for the hackathon to kick off, but many still didn’t know what they wanted to put their energy in. By mid-day saturday, many hackers still didn’t know what to work on, but we were on the terrace helping them bounce around some ideas to help fuel their creative juices over some top-quality java.

Saturday’s focus centered around social media. One Ninety Seven Roasters and Flux Coffee continued to caffeinate the hackers as we instigated a little contest of our own. Our good friends Val, Dianna, and Josh came to help out and lead the social media campaign. They brought a vase filled with coffee beans and asked the hackers to tweet their estimates of how many beans were inside. Some just threw out wild guesses, but many of the hackers conceived of some really clever measuring frameworks that were indicative of their unconventional problem-solving mindsets. Amazingly, the right guess was within 15 beans of the exact number. Congratulations Sudhir Navalapakam for estimating with such calculated precision. We wouldn’t be surprised if he got a Google offer the next day.

Sunday Funday started with Tico Roasters arriving at six in the morning to start brewing the coffee while Rip rained the wafels. We wanted to make sure we kept in contact with everyone who liked the coffee enough to want more, so we brought a simple signup pad that asked them to write their name, company, and email address. We ended up with two pages full of potential leads.

Our marketing formula for the hackathon was simple: Introduce, Entertain, Sustain.

Special thanks to Luke, Emily, Jade, Simon, Jason D., Brandice, Kristan, Gina, and of course Jason for having us at the event. We know you worked super hard and it showed!

Extra Special thanks to our friends Tim, Josh, Val, Diana for providing the fun and helping us share our message.

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