Hack The Future - 2022
Hi, welcome to my blog post about my experience attending Hack the Future 2022, hope you enjoy!
Hack The future is an event that is organized annually by the company the Cronos Group. This year was special because it was the first time the event took place in the historic "Handelsbeurs Antwerpen", located in the heart of Antwerp. The theme for the event this year was "Wizard Academy".
The Journey
For me , the "journey" started the day before, because of the location of the event, I decided to book at hotel room situated at about a 15 minutes walk from the Handelsbeurs.
I had decided to meet up with my team mate. The event started at 08H00, where we first got an hour to get acquainted, a very nice breakfast and coffee was offered. We also received our badges for the event. The badge already mentioned at which challenge we would need to participate. I will come back later to the challenge part.
At 09:00, the introduction started. There, they gave information about the online environment they created, where we would be voting at the end of the day.
The Challenge room
Now that all the introduction is over, we come to the part where everybody would go to each room for a specific challenge. During the event registration, everybody had to give 3 desired challenges they wanted to take part in. As a team, our 3 options we wanted were:
- Laravel Challenge
- Typescript & JavaScript
- .NET
The week before the event, we received an email informing us which challenge we were going to attend, which for us was the Laravel challenge. We were pretty okay with this selection, as we had some experience from using this in school.
So continuing to everybody being assigned the room for the challenge, because there were a lot of people queuing and a lot of people, it took a while before our challenge was called. Very funny to notice that a lot of people from my classes / school also decided to take part in this specific challenge.
The challenge room was every nice. They had set up tables for each group.
After settling down, the coaches of the particular challenge gave the briefing of what the challenge would be. So what we would be required to build for the day.
After the briefing ended, we immediately started cracking, but there was a problem! The internet was behaving very slow. So the weekend before I had setup an VM with everything required to run an Laravel project.
Challenge
They provided us with an example project witch we should be working of. But the example project had newer version of the software that was installed on the VM I had created before. So we started with trying to update the installed packages, but the internet was so slow, we decided to use my 4G connection. This sped-up the downloading of the packages.
Lunch
During lunch, I talked with some of the coaches. I informed them that I already had a Laravel project setup. So I was allowed to copy the required boilerplate files over to the working project and hooray!
Trying to make a MVP
Due to some more problems we only had one person able to actively develop on the project. So I started by just using JavaScript and creating some basic web pages. So, at least we had something to present.
Pitching
After having done our best to produce a MVP, we had to present our project. To improve our changes of winning, which were pretty small, we also made a power point.
So during the pitching everybody got the option to vote for their favourite. Each challenges would get a fan favourite.
Once the pitching was finished, it was time for us to leave the room and let the coaches decide on who their pick would be.
Award Ceremony
After a few hours waiting the Award ceremony finally began. It was a bit exciting to see who would win. Unfortunately, our group wasn't really in the winnings.
But at least, the group "Department of Variety" won both prices; Jury & fan favourite.
After the ceremony, we were invited to join the buffet. It was really delicious!
Conclusion
Overall, this was definitely a very enjoyable experience. It was a good learning experience beside the problems we had. I would definitely recommend all computer science students to attend this event!
For sure, I will be there again next year, with other challenges. Maybe the TypeScript or .NET challenge.
I hope you learned something from this blog post, thank you for reading!