TL;DR
Teamed up with a bunch of awesome people for HackManchester 2018 and won the main challenge by building an IoT-button-controlled time machine.
Partners in Crime
I've partaken in a few hackathons before and was even relatively successful with previous teams. This participation at HackManchester 2018 though is so distinctly unique from other experienes that I thought it is blog-worthy! I was not the only one. Two of my team mates, Clare Sudbery and Sal Freudenberg, both wrote blog posts on their experiences, too! Check them out to see their perspective:
Clare Sudbery is a special colleague of mine. Not only did we work closely together on a project, she also was one of the people involved in my entry interview at ThoughtWorks. She used to be a maths teacher before her consultant life and when she explains things, you can just tell that she has experience in that.
One day, she approached a group of female colleagues, including myself and asked if we were interested in participating at this year's HackManchester, a hackathon that she attended last year with an all-female team and almost won the main challenge, Best in Show. As someone who would rarely decline a hackathon, I happily agreed.
Sal Freudenberg is a director at Cucumber who used to be an agile coach, a project manager, a developer and even a diver. Did I also mention that she holds a PhD in the Psychology of Collaborative Software Development?
Luce Carter is a Software Developer at Dunnhumby. She has a passion for Xamarin mobile development. So much so that she was awarded by Microsoft. Like Clare, she is a returning attendee of HackManchester. She is also very active in the Mancunian development community.
Those summaries are too short to do my team mates justice. They are all admirable people/women/engineers/mothers that I look up to.
Our Approach
Never before did I attend a hackathon and prepared for it in advance. Preparation in this case means e-meeting each other and talking about the rough idea we want to work on, as well as our tools. More important than the tools though was to me the discussion of each one's hopes and expecations. By making this clear from the very beginning, there was no later misunderstanding or misalignment in the team. Though none of us knew each other before, I immediately felt that we all are on the same page when it comes to our expectations from the hack. Everyone agreed that we would emphasise self-care over everything else. I am not sure if that was because of coincidence or because we all share one same contact, Clare, which might suggest that there was a higher chance of all of us having similar views.
Other than that, during the hackathon, we basically agile'd the shit out of our product (an IoT-button-controlled time machine app which I will not explain in more detail as this post is much more about my experiences developing it. Check out my team mates' posts though if you like to know more). You should have seen the faces of our fellow contestants when we plastered the wall with post-its - a result of our story-mapping expercise. We defined our MVP in such a way that it allowed us to improve it incrementally.
To get closer to our ultimate MVP, we worked in one-hour sprints. Every sprint ended with a retrospective to reflect on what worked well, what did not work well. We wrote our code in pairs whenever we could. Unlike at previous hackathon collaborations, this allowed me to actually understand the code that was written holistically, from back to front end.
Consistent with the pledge that we each made at the beginning of the hack to ensure self-care comes first, we ended up working in shifts where two of the team members, Luce and I, that clearly identified as morning larks, left the venue early in the evening. We returned to the hacking space early in the morning the next day, where Sal and Clare have left us not only a working MVP but also detailed documentation.
Why did we win?
As I see it, our strengh lied in our belief that no matter how the state of our product is, we will not compromise our wellbeing. Only when our wellbeing levels are at 100% (or in Sal's case close to 100 since she had the flu...) can we produce useful code. This realisation might seem like a no-brainer at first but I think that because we are part of an increasingly meritocratic society, people tend to forget. The fact that a hackathon is a tightly time-constrained competition makes the realisation even less likely.
I have to admit that when our team was annouced as the winner by Craig from WebApplications UK and he pointed out our gender and how this stands for the change that is happening in the industry towards more equal gender representation, I immediately thought that the prize was given to us because we are women. After some reflection though, I can confidently say that we were genuinely recognised because of what we have produced at the hackathon. We have followed good coding practices and agile methodologies. We took care of ourselves and each other. We reaped what we sow.
Still, I do think it cannot be entirely excluded that we gained some sympathy points for our comparably curious-looking workplace, with ergonomic work stations with laptop stands, aroma therapy oil, lots of post-its and good vibes throughout the hackathon.
Check out the GitHub repo if you like here.
We also have a YouTube video that Sal produced. Check it out below: 