On the weekend of November 8 to 10, 2019, doubleSlash was able to accompany a great event as experts: The first Hackathon of the Oerlikon Group in the great atmosphere of the Oerlikon Digital Hub. In addition to workshop rooms and even a movie theater, the technical setup is excellent and made work easier for all participants.
Hackathon? Pure knowledge in agile solution competence
Pragmatic and agile in one: The aim is to achieve the following within the duration of a hackathon event to jointly produce useful, creative or entertaining IT or software products or applications and thus find solutions to existing problems.
A broad mix of talented people
The event's target group was a very broad mix of talented people: from Software developers, data scientists and industry specialists. The approximately 80 participants were made up of Students, software developers up to Data Scientists and Oerlikon employees.
The challenges were divided into 4 categories: IoT, computer vision, data science and waste reduction - whereby the last category can probably also be categorized as a data science task. There were up to two challenges in each of these categories - in total 7 Challenges. Only a defined number of teams could register for each challenge to ensure that all challenges were tackled.
Five doubleSlash IoT and AI experts on site
At the request of Oerlikon, the doubleSlash the event as Sponsor in the form of five experts to support the participants: Vincenzo Crimi, Nico Mutter, Andreas Nuber, Timo Demler and Ralf Richter. We gave Assistance in the areas of Consulting, coding, architecture, technical specialization with PTC and Microsoft Azurebut also in the area of Organization and structuring. Our experts supported the teams by advising them and helping them with development, without influencing the solution.
Together with our partner PTC, we decided right at the start of the hackathon to provide our usual close cooperation for the support of the teams. In addition to mentoring the teams, we delivered two great workshops in the areas of Ideation and pitch training. Both workshops were a great success and made a valuable contribution to the success of the hackathon.
Conclusion
The commitment of our experts to the teams was remarkable and went beyond the limits of a normal working day. All participating teams appreciated this support noticeably, and positive feedback was also received during the pitches. We have also had very positive experiences with this agile event format in other formats and see the clear benefits here. Added value: Swarm intelligence in an agile atmosphere creates innovative solutions to specific problems together.
We are particularly proud of the fact that all the teams that made active use of doubleSlash's help made it to the finals. We are particularly pleased about the success of our doubleSlash student team: they achieved a very good 4th place out of 17 teams. We are looking forward to upcoming events that we can support as doubleSlash or even organize ourselves.
