BETWEEN sponsored the 2017 HACKUPC, the biggest Hackathon in Europe, which place from March 3rd to 5th this year, and gathered more than 500 students from all over the continent.
This year the event was held for the second time and gathered programmers from all over the world with the challenge of creating new applications, hardware and websites during a whole weekend (including at night) in a space specifically conceived and adapted for them.
HACKUPC began on Friday 3rd with the first contacts among programmers and the participant companies, which implied a great opportunity for HR teams to attract new talents. During that day, every company introduces the students their challenge.
At BETWEEN we wanted to present a motivating challenge for participants, both from the technical and human-oriented point of view, thus the challenge proposed was the creation of a geo-localisation system to find victims in natural disasters, fitted with a chat system to contact rescue services. Basic requirements were clear: the system should allow geo-localisation and chat messaging.
To make the challenge happen, Betweeners from the IT LAB gave support to participant hackers through the Slack channel during the whole weekend and, in addition, they took part in the assessments and the final presentation.
On their side, the BETWEEN marketing team was also working from Friday to Sunday at the HACKUPC, delivering corporate presentations, replying questions and scattering the Betweener spirit through the attendees.
It was a busy weekend with a constant presence on the side of BETWEEN. Apart from the great follow-up of the challenge by the students, BETWEEN carried out other activities, such as a presentation on Functional Programming, delivered by Salva Rubio and Francesc Ortiz.
On Sunday, last day of the challenge, all the eyes were fixed on the participants. Part of the IT LAB team assessed the works hackers carried out and confirmed they found a quality job and very interesting challenges; proposals were very detailed, but only one could win.
On Sunday afternoon, it was time to announce the winner: Whale Protection (Diakov Maksim, Alexandr Naumov, Tomasz Czernuszenko). The winning group made the best out of its ingenuity to create a Facebook application, in which messages were geo-localised and their content analysed to identify suicidal patterns; in that case, a chat with a Psychologist automatically popped out to give support and assess the situation.
The HACKUPC allowed us to see in first person the level of talent in future programmers’ generations and, once again, to strengthen and identify talent within the academic field.
