Kids these days
Last weekend I was fortunate to be a technical evaluator of an hackathon. Yes, I’m trying to be vague here, as my company sponsored this event at a most reputed university of our state, this post is just my view.
There were 9 team participated out of which 3 teams dropped off and only 5 were presented at the end of 48 hour hackathon.
The funny thing is organizers of this programme was surprised that the students are completely prepared, I heard they didn’t raise any question at the end of our opening speech. Their only worry was which of their idea can be executed within the given time which was a surprise for our team.
All of their ideas are good, though I was aware of similar apps, I didn’t share any of my feedback as I thought it might demotivate them as I only joined at the end of the hackathon. One of the team was thinking they are having next billion dollar idea, and they were referring themselves as a competitor to a famous site of their domain. I happen to agree, if they pitch to right people they could definitely make few millions.
Kids are between 2nd-4th year of CS background. One of the team people actually left for like 4 hrs to participate in another programme. All of the participates already secured a 6 digit income per month :-)
I was really impressed by their talents especially the knowledge of tools. All of them aware of native/hybrid mobile development and right framework. For eg., most of them developed app using jQuery mobile and Cordova to package, codiqa to get the UI up and running, and their knowledge in the plugins one of the team actually published their plugin in GitHub. Another team started with a style guide, only few of my project starts with a branding guidelines in my decade old professional experience.
If I own a time machine and I’ll travel back in time to kick myself in the butt for not getting high scores which could have changed my life. What can I say, I was, and still is a day dreamer.