hack{Cyprus}2016

The time for our favourite hacking event in Cyprus has come!
The hack{Cyprus} 2016 hackathon website is now alive.

What is a Hackathon?

The word “hackathon” is a portmanteau of the words “hack” and “marathon”, where “hack” is used in the sense of exploratory programming and “marathon” is used to show the continuous work that the task requires.  A hackathon is an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development and hardware development collaborate intensively on software/hardware projects. The event typically lasts between a day and a week.  The goal of a hackathon is to educate people about new technologies, help them socialize with each other and create usable software.  Hackathons usually have a “hacking” theme. A “hacking” theme is a set of additional rules that each team should follow but it is not restrictive. Hacking themes include rules such as using specific programming languages, APIs, operating systems and hardware components.

hack{Cyprus}

hack{Cyprus} is an annual team-based hackathon organized by Cypriot Enterprise Link (CEL). Teams consist of one, two, three, four or five members. You can form a team prior to the event but you can also form a team when you get to the venue (before or after the Welcome Ceremony).

More Info

The Hackathon takes place between 24th June 2016 and 26th June 2016 @ Limassol.
Stay tuned for more info!
Last year, hack{Cyprus} took place between 26th June 2015 and 28th June 2015 @ Nicosia.
You can check out My Experience @ hack{Cyprus} 2015 here.

Visit the hack{Cyprus}2016 Hackathons Website.
Visit the hack{Cyprus}2015 Hackathons Website.

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hack{Cyprus} 2015 has taken place between 26th June 2015 and 28th June 2015 @ Capital Impact, Nicosia. Our team’s name was GMP (initial letters of each member’s name) and consisted of three members, me and two friends from the university.  Our hackathon project was to make an application which translates Greek Sign Language to Greek Language and helps people learn Greek Sign Language with an interactive tutorial.

Walk-through the Hackathon

On Friday 26th, the hackathon began with the Welcome Ceremony which was an introductory presentation to the hacking event. After that, the teams were formed and the hacking began! After the formation round, my team consisted of five members (don’t be afraid to go on your own). On Friday night, we were experimenting with Myo Armband but we found out that it mapped hand gestures but not finger gestures. Then, on Saturday morning, we moved on to Leap Motion which was an excellent option for mapping both types of gestures. After hours of coding, we made a Java application which mapped correctly the hand and finger gestures (hand visualization & text confirmation of moving finger – which hand and which finger is moving), presented statistics such as moving speed of each hand and stored the coordinates of each hand’s palm and each palm’s finger. On Saturday afternoon, there was an individual online coding contest with prizes for the first, second and third place. On Saturday evening, we created an SQL database with words and their coordinates but realized that the matching of an input gesture with a word wouldn’t be possible because the hand gesture from the sensor had different palm and finger coordinates from the stored coordinates and the previous input’s coordinates. On Sunday, we presented the idea of the application, the Java application and our future plans for the app to the other teams of the hackathon and to interested guests. The demonstration sessions help you to rethink some of the important and tiny details of your application in terms of software usability and user experience. Then, the voting for the best teams/hackathon projects took place. The hackathon ended with the Closing Ceremony where the results of the voting were announced and the top 3 software hacks were awarded cool prizes.

To Go or Not to Go?

These are the pros and cons of going to a hackathon based on my first hackathon experience.

Pros:

Free Entrance.

Free Food and Drinks.

Experiment with new hardware components.

Implement a cool idea.

Implement a useful application.

Meet new people with similar interests.

Get immediate feedback on your idea/app.

Improve your user experience and software engineering understanding.

Cons:

Small duration of hackathon.

Small capacity of venue.

No sleep accommodation (Bring your sleeping bag ).

The post My experience @ hack{Cyprus} 2015 appeared first on BadFive.

Purpose:

Google IO hosts developer-focused sessions on building web and mobile applications with Google.
Also, the conference introduces open web technologies such as Android, Chrome OS, Google APIs to developers through code labs.

Registration – Attendance:

Between 8-10 of March, you can register online on the Google IO website for a chance to buy tickets to Google I/O 2016.  Because of the event’s quick sell out in the previous years, Google has decided to give a higher chance of attendance to those who are interested for the event. On March 10th, Google will draw names of applicants to attend the event, randomly. The qualified attendees are going to be informed via email.

Ticket Options & Prices:

Each qualified attendee can purchase a ticket whether he/she is in academia or industry.
There are two ticket options:
General Admission Ticket: $900.
Academic Admission Ticket: $300.

Live stream:

You can watch the live stream of some of the sessions via I/O Live on the Official Google IO 2016 Website.

Visit the Official Google IO Website: Google IO 2016

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