Largest hackathon in Europe held in Warsaw
The largest hackathon event in Europe and the second largest in the world, after Saudi Arabia, has been held in Warsaw.
The Hack Yeah event at the Ptak Warsaw Expo saw over 2,700 programmers compete from noon on Saturday until noon on Sunday with over 100 individuals being recognized and winning prizes.
Hack Yeah organizer Marta Kowalska told TFN: “HackYeah is a space for growth. The story of many teams do not end at HackYeah but it continues. Many of the projects are implemented, or become foundation for new ideas that are later developed.
The third edition of Hack Yeah offered programmers from around the world an opportunity to collaborate on projects, meet up with online friends and show off their skills to potential employers. Many of the tasks set by government organizations and private firms also focused on promoting social goals.
PM Mateusz Morawiecki popped into the event thanking all innovators, environmentalists, programmers, engineers and architects who took part in a brainstorming about water for creating valuable solutions to socially significant problems.
Hack Yeah organizer Marta Kowalska told TFN: “HackYeah is a space for growth. The story of many teams do not end at HackYeah but it continues. Many of the projects are implemented, or become foundation for new ideas that are later developed.
The 24-hour-long event lasted from noon on Saturday until noon on Sunday.
“The great prizes aside, our partners often continue cooperation with finalists and other interesting teams they came across during the event. For many people HackYeah is a good place to put their work life or interest in coding into a new direction.”
Piotr Switalski, Head of Press & Media at the European Commission in Poland, told TFN: “We wanted to engage young people from across Europe in politics.”
Among the government agencies and departments present were the Polish Armed Forces who offered three prizes for different cyber security projects, GovTech who awarded prizes to four teams solving problems related to water and the EU joined Hack Yeah for the first time awarding the prize, for a Chabot that would help filter fake news about Brexit, to Krakow based team Code Heroes.
“We wanted to engage young people from across Europe in politics. We don’t want to dictate to them what they should think, so it was important that we used this project to create an application that helped us learn and have a dialogue. We loved the energy of the event and sense of community, we look forward to coming back next year,” Piotr Switalski, Head of Press & Media at the European Commission in Poland, told TFN.
Adam Piszczatowski, the head of Industry 4.0 at Bosch Rexroth told TFN: “We designed a task for the participants using our equipment, Bosch security cameras and engines, where they would take a photo of the production process and feed back the image to the machine, telling it when to stop and perform an operation.
The EU representatives also invited two runner up teams to join them and Code Heroes in Brussels to develop the project further. This was a common theme with many of the winners and runners up being invited for further co-operation.
Bosch Rexroth, another first time sponsor of a prize, had a unique and arguably the most popular challenge of the weekend.
Despite there being sleeping zones with airbeds many participants crashed out at their desk.
Adam Piszczatowski, the head of Industry 4.0 at Bosch Rexroth, and the driving force behind getting the company involved at the event told TFN: “We designed a task for the participants using our equipment, Bosch security cameras and engines, where they would take a photo of the production process and feed back the image to the machine, telling it when to stop and perform an operation.
One of the teams pitches their final project to the Bosch team, can the camera inform the machine when to perform an operation?
“At Bosch Rexroth we are very focused on automation and Industry 4.0 and we found many good competitors here this weekend,” he said.
