This weekend was Hack24. It was my first time at this event happening for its fourth year, and now I regret never going before. I’m on a journey here, from dismissing the entire idea, to being curious (last year), to volunteering (this year), to wanting to do a hack for myself (next year). The whole thing was absolutely brilliant, and I want to write about it.
What the heck is it anyway?
So for those of you who don’t know, Hack24 is a 24-hour coding competition-slash-community event held in the heart of Nottingham - in the Council House, no less. The Council House is a very impressive building from outside, but even more ridiculous inside with a massive marble staircase, very high ceilings and a lot of wood panelling and mirrors. It feels like a privilege to hold such an event in such a central, prominent venue as the very seat of the city council itself.
During the competition teams of up to four hackers work on a project to enter into one or more of the challenges set by the various event sponsors. Well, you don’t have to enter any challenges at all, but if you’re putting all that effort in you might as well because you might win one of the awesome prizes.
Sponsors vary from year to year, but my current employer Esendex have sponsored the event before and also sponsored it this year, so we were offering prizes and entered a full team (plus had some other hackers attending) to compete. As a volunteer, I wasn’t involved in any of that!
How awesome was it?
Very, very awesome.
Why?
- The food. Seriously, it was amazing food and it was generously provisioned. Nobody needed to fear going hungry even if they were the very last person in line and a member of one of the smaller dietary groups.
- The people. From us volunteers in our lovely red hoodies to the hackers to the caterers and the astonishingly persistently energetic forces that are Emma and Andrew Seward the people were universally amazing. I had some great discussions and discoveries during the weekend, and also never had an issue asking people to get out of the way after eating so other diners could eat!
- The hot chocolate
- The prizes. Seriously some of the prizes are amazing. Which ones you think are amazing will vary depending on your taste though.
- The challenges. From “use AI for good” (Microsoft) to “rhyme with UNiDAYS” (err… UNiDAYS) to “help people to understand money” there was a varied set of challenges which nonetheless overlapped enough to allow most people to enter multiple challenges and give the judges a really hard time deciding!
- The Best Video prize, which let us watch three amazing, hilarious, wonderful videos during the prizegiving ceremony and gave some recognition to some teams who hadn’t won anything with their hack.
- The buzz. Even with one hour to go there was buzz, not stress, in the hacking room. Some people were stressed, sure, some people were falling asleep at their computers, but the overall atmosphere was remarkably positive. And actually, after breakfast it perked up a lot.
- The food. Again. Seriously. You couldn’t do this event without decent catering. Even though people were supplementing it with trips to Doughnotts, but hey it’s Doughnotts and who really wants to say no to augmenting their hacking energy with a giant doughnut containing an entire Mars bar and topped with chocolate and caramel?
- All the other stuff going on. Saturday evening entertainment (Deal Or No Deal presented by Andrew Seward who has a fallback career as a game show host if he needs it, with a surprise appearance from Mr Blobby himself - by ‘surprise’ I mean Andrew had no idea but rolled with it anyway). The conversations around the building. The podcast interviews. The live streams. The live blogs. Kate’s Heart Internet water bottle competition. The amazing team stickers. The watermelon sweets. The people from MHR desperately trying to give away a giant bag of chocolates on the Sunday as things were winding down and they realised they really didn’t want to eat them all themselves.
So it was good?
Yeah. It was good.
Bring on next year.