This January we organized the second edition of our internal hackathon called InterHack. We had three teams participating in the competition, two were in Bitola and one in Skopje. The winning team was from Bitola and they won a weekend trip to Mavrovo.
The members of the winning team were the following:
Ivo Bogevski a .NET consultant who has just finished a Digital Signage project successfully. His specialty is JavaScript especially the Angular framework which he uses on most projects.
Zoran Nasev works on a project for a large transport company. He specializes in Amazon Web Services. His daily tasks are related to creating infrastructure using Amazon services and a cloud environment where the applications are executed.
Dimitar Bosevski is our Microsoft Practice Lead and is a specialist in .NET programming, Azure and Microsoft products.
Ivan Iskov is a Software Developer. He is working on a credit management system platform. He uses mostly Laravel, Handlebars, Vagrant, and MySQL in his daily job.
Kire Boshev works on a project for a Telecommunication company and has a vast knowledge in .NET, .NET Core 2.0 and above, MS SQL server and so on. In his daily tasks, he uses mostly Visual studio 2019, MS SQL server management studio, Postman and SoapUI.
Marin Apchevski is a TIBCO consultant and is currently working on improving his Tibco skills through internal projects.
Magdalena Ljamchevska is a QA consultant. She works on a project for a large retail company based in the USA. She has a vast experience in exploring how the software works and how it breaks using Ghost Inspector and JMeter as automation tools and manual testing in SCRUM as well.
We decided to ask all participants one simple question. So, read what they had to say in the interview below:
1. Why did you apply to participate in InterHack?
Ivo Bogoevski: This is my second time to participate in InterHack. It is always a good idea to hang out with colleagues and work on something challenging and learn something new about my colleagues and about technologies they are working on. The atmosphere was great, the teamwork was great and luckily for me, I was part of the winning team for the second time in a row. I will surely be part of the next InterHack if I have a chance.
2. What was the main idea of the solution you were working on?
Zoran Nasev: We had a task to create a solution that will be able to find complex relationships between entities in a graph database. The idea was to work in parallel as much as possible, giving priority to crucial tasks. Our strength was having team members from different backgrounds and we had the right person for each task. Once completed, all parts were integrated into a final solution.
3. What technologies did you use to develop the solution that won?
Dimitar Bosevski: Technology is changing every day, it can revolutionize our world, and everything is possible if we are able to put our ideas into practice. For this hackathon we needed to break our old thinking patterns, to brainstorm a lot and to get fresh perspectives. We used Neo4J as a powerful graph database, we created dynamic and amazing data visualization using D3 JavaScript library, web services using the latest version of .NET Core and frontend portal using Angular 8.
4. Did you expect to win? How did you feel when you were announced as winners?
Ivan Iskov: In the beginning, we were involved in the process and there was not much time to think about the final outcome. I am happy for winning the hackathon, and I liked the entire process of learning new technologies, implementing the solutions in a short time span and spending time with colleagues from different practices as we got the chance to get to know each other a little better.
5. Is there something other teams used you thought was brilliant?
Kire Boshev: Yes, the team from Skopje had brilliant UI.
6. What would you change if you were given the same task today?
Marin Apchesvki: I would say there aren’t many things I would change except for one. I would propose we look at the requirements of the task, with paying attention to more details and make sure we complete as many as we can.
7. A lot of people find hackathon participation a bit scary, especially if it is their first time. Is there something you can say to encourage them?
Magdalena Ljamchevska : This Hackathon gave me a rare chance to work with individuals that have long years of experience across many different fields and areas.
The hacking trick was for participants to dive into problems. It was about building new data visualization, writing a document, or collaboratively investigating a problem working as a team while sharing knowledge and ideas.
Overall, don’t hesitate! Give yourself a chance to grow your professional skills in a good way and show off your talents.
Bite the bullet and sign up for the upcoming one. What do you have to lose?
Conclusion
Overall, we are very satisfied with InterHack and very pleased to state that it was a productive day that three teams spent together working side by side on developing new ideas and concepts that will hopefully turn into a new system we use daily.
⋮IWConnect strongly believes in gaining knowledge and sharing it so we can’t wait for our next hackathon!
You can watch the video of the event here:
Are you interested in organizing hackathons? Check our blog post on that topic:
https://iwconnect.com/how-to-organize-an-internal-hackathon/
