Hackathon in PANDA

Being part of Chennai Geeks group and reading the blogs of my tech friends was eagerly waiting be part of the next Hackathon.

Jealous in me started buiding up when my friends company hosts hackathon for their employees to showcase their geeky skills.As said earlier was closely following up the various forums on next event to get participate to learn and to get some great exposure.

In the mean time I was just thinking about why don’t we organize a Hackathon in our company which will be first of its kind.But doing it for the entire company is difficult , hence changed my decision and made it little narrower to the project I am working in.

Once the thought came in I was looking for oppurtunity to make it real. I have just made my experiences in oraganizing this event for my project in this blog post…

Initial Thoughts Once I decided that the event should be organized for the project, I started with preparations for it.But I had the following questions

How the event is going to oragnized focussing on the application? How am I going to convince management to invest time for this event? How will the team members react to the event and what will be the level of participation?

I just made my mind clear since the event is first of its kind it should be organized to meet all the expectations.

The first meeting I just prepared a typical formal presentation about the event and met with the management team of my project to convey them the real concept.

It is neccessary to showcase the outcomes of anything to management to convince them. So in the presentation I made it clear that what would be major outcomes of the event. It was the three category that made the management to give Go Signal for me to proceed.The ideas/hacks were categorized as *Technical *Functional *Data *Process

The team members need to develop something on any of these type with respect to the application.

With the them clear next constraint we had was the duration of the event. Since team members had their daily routines and support to business is of top priority the event can’t be organized for whole day. It was also not possible to conduct it during the weekends similar to typical Hackathons.

With clear condition of Not to distrupt business support management gave me green signal to proceed with the event.

Immediately I prepared a teaser mail and gave a heads up to the team members about the event.

to be contd..