Hackathon #2

Last weekend, Christian, Rene, Niko, Tobias and myself attended at the #pfaffhack 3.0 at the Fraunhofer IESE. For Christian, Rene and me it was our second attendance on this hackathon event (series).

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, the hackathon was held in an remote mode without actual physical presence of the attendees. For our team this offered the possiblity to allow friends with a large physical distance to the (theoretical) location to attend aswell, so we could attend with a slightly bigger group with a larger shared knowledge in the to-be-used technologies. More brains, more profit!

A cool idea was the studio livestream during the event, filled with talks about different topics, like Containers, React.js and also how to do a pitch presentation and many others. Personally, that helped to feel a bit more like being at an event than just another Teams call. I really liked the professional presentation. Sadly, I missed the majority of the talks due to a mandatory study lecture.

We used the weeks in front of the event to prepare ourselves in terms of technology. With this strategy, we aimed to focus more on the topic itself than on technology and stack discussions. In sum, we utilized following technologies and tools:

• Vue.js
• vue-router
• Visual-Studio code and it's live share feature

We choosed the live share feature to have a more real time collaboration expierience than we would have with using classical, git based approach. We made quite good expieriences with that tooling last time, so we utilized it again. Of course we used git versioning aswell, but our main work was done using a collaborative session within Visual Studio code.

It was cool to get in touch with the organizers at the evening hours to have a chat, playing some rounds of Among us (I still think that Rene is kinda sus!) and to have an exchange about what happended so far and where issues occured.

The organizers were always super committed to provide help, e. g. to troubleshoot API communication with the platform, mostly ending with the realisation that we copied a whitespace (again)😂.

In sum, three teams attended the event and also managed to present their solutions. 💯!

It was interesting to see how teams set their main focus and what technologies they utilized. Nice to see another project utilizing the Vue.js stack, which we also utilized to develop our BeetBrudi app.

In conclusion, the organizers at the Fraunhofer IESE showed again that they can get the event successfully running, even with such complicated conditions during this COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks for another #pfaffhack! See you att the next event!

Photo by James Harrison on Unsplash