Alexander Beletsky's development blog

My profession is engineering

Hackatone in Kiev 11-12 June

This weekend I’ve been visiting very interesting event - Hackatone that took place in Ciklum office. Hackatone is whole night hacking session there every team or person could came up with any idea, implement it and present to crowd. Many times I heard about similar events either in podcasts or blogs that I read.. but never tried that myself. Thank’s for DOU enthusiasts I got opportunity to try that. Here is my report of that event. There would be some mix of English and Russian language, hope that would not make you confuse :)

The event began with common meeting there people were sharing ideas of applications they are going to build. During my pretty long journey with in Continues Production I already got my idea - I wanted to build Deployment-as-Service product that easily integrated with github and utilizes power of UppercuT for building .NET web applications. There was very few .NET developers there, already having their own ideas to build.. so I went alone.

If you have been to Ciklum office, you probably know what SkyPoint is.. It is 20-th floor in office that resides on one Kiev’s hills, so you might imagine this exceptional view from there. I grabbed a chair started to work.

Due to experience I got with .NET deployments and Jenkins I had pretty much well understanding what the workflow should be. I’ve created ASP.NET MVC3 in my Visual Studio and stared to develop. The scope of work I planned to do was pretty much big and I a little nervous about my ability to finish everything. I tried to work as fast as I can.. Full hour, that 10 minutes break and full hour again. Maybe because of that creative atmosphere around or straight orientation on final result but I think I really got a Flow..

So, after ~3 hour of work I’ve created my github repository for new project - Candidate.net:

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Keeping that rhythm I continued to work mostly till 3.00 AM.. About 60% of work were done. I felt a little tired and decided to stop for today and had a good sleep to continue tomorrow. My plans were ruined as soon as I stepped to 19th there people gathered together.. So, in 5 minutes I got several shots of cognac and was sitting on a floor with guitar in my hands :). I had a real fun and relax there. Haven’t noticed at all how 2 hours are gone and sun started to rise.. We had a really nice moment of meeting new day on staying on office balcony.

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I have to continue the implementation, so I went back to SkyPoint and run my Visual Studio again. Of cause I could not get such rhythm as I got yesterday, the process were much slower. I had to refuse of several more ideas I wanted to build, ignore the rules of Clean Code, SOLID and DRY. Did some ugly tricks, just to make application work. I had issues with testing and deployment since WiFi connection were quite slow. But, long story short - I implemented very basic workflow and realized that would be it for presentation.

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I found a sofa and finally got a change to have a sleep. Don’t know why but I managed to sleep only for one hour, just woke up and could not sleep again. So, I had a shower (yes, there are showers in Ciklum office), coffee.. and very nice breakfast. I had some time before presentation began, so I re-tested my application several times more and was happy about results.

At 15.00 PM presentations began! I showed Candidate.net ability to initialize new application, build and deploy it in minutes.. How you can deliver with just a push a code to github, the rest of job done by Candidate. I don’t think I really impress people there, because of .NET crowd were to small.. but I tried to do best. After the presentation I’ve been contacted by several guys who interested with such concept.

Most of the presented projects were either old-school games implemented with new technologies or mobile applications. One guys did a nice linux kernel exploration and share his ideas.

After there was a manual voting for each project to decide on 3 best, I didn’t win :). Winners got their congratulations and presents for sponsors. I quit really quickly since I was a little late for my friend wedding that was that day :)

That was really nice experience for me. I appreciate Ciklum, DOU and everyone involved, who make that possible. Thank you guys :)