Last weekend, I participated in a hackathon. If you are reading this blog in 2020, I don’t have to explain why we have a virtual hackathon.

A Virtual Hackathon

If you are on Mars, please know that we made a naive recommendation of a process to communicate between our two planets. If our recommendation is the way we are communicating between the two planets, you are welcome!

I had an opportunity to participate in NASA International Space App Challenge 2020. This was a virtual hackathon where teams all over the Earth were working on several challenges proposed by NASA in collaboration with several other space agencies. Participants were allowed to form local teams or collaborate with an international team.

The Team

We were a mix of local and international team. We had three members (including me) from Sydney, one from Malaysia, and another one from India. We had a business professional, an electrical engineer, a mechatronics engineer, a student of aerospace engineering, and a school student who aspires to become a physicist in out team. We were fortunate that the skills of the team members included knowledge of oribtal mechanics, coding, project management, graphic design, and video editing. Despite the diversity in skill sets, we all were funny and easy going.

The Challenge

The team picked up communication challenge between Earth and Mars. This meant that we were going to discuss all the possible science fiction stories and movies we have read and watched respectively. We started with Isaac Asimov’s story My Son, the physicist. Then, we talked about The Martian, Star Trek, and any other science fiction stories we could think about. We also discussed ideas such as Uber Eats for Mars.

The Technologies

A virtual hackathon means that you do not have the privilege to use a white board, post-it notes, and a personal support. So, following are some pieces of software that helped us:

Miro

Miro was helpful for post-it notes and drawing our ideas.

Trello

We used Trello as our Kanban board to track our activities.

Discord

Discord was the highlight of the event. We created our Server. We had following channels:

• #general
• #ideas
• #files
• #team-meeting-times
• #coding-stuff

We tried to keep the chat fun and cheerful. We used a lot of gifs and emojis in our messages. We even shared non-hackathon related stuff such as going for a run, grocery shopping, burnt waffles, and so on. We could easily get on a voice chat, and spend hours working on the voice chat. The voice chat narrowed the gap between an in-person hackathon and a virtual hackathon.

GitHub

GitHub is a version control platform. We used GitHub to share our project in our pitch and collaborate on the project in a team. Here’s the source code for our project if you are interested.

The Pros and Cons

Pros:

• We could collaborate with individuals from all over the world.
• We could disconnect and work quietly without interruptions.
• Take a break and perform other weekend chores.
• Reduce travelling time and sleep overnight.

Cons:

• We couldn’t lobby to form the team.
• There was a lack of continuous mentor support.
• A lack of presenting the project and ideas.

Conclusion

Hackathons for me have always been about meeting new people, learning new things, and testing my skills. The people I’ve met in hackathons have always helped me in building my skills and some of them have been good mentors. A virtual hackathon was something I wanted to try with the current circumstances. Not that I don’t miss the energy of in-person hackathons. Yet, knowing that we found a way around the crisis and still united to conduct a hackathon for the common good of humanity is fascinating.

Image Credit: Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash