In early February, 24i held a Hackathon event, in which all employees had an opportunity to engage in developing a cool new idea. The main goal was to collaborate and socialise with colleagues from other teams, create and present innovative ideas, and most importantly to have fun! In this blog, QA Engineer graduate Tomáš Ferenčík answers some questions about his experience of participating from 24i’s Brno office.
In total, 14 teams developed and presented their unique ideas for this year’s hackathon. You can read more about it here: https://www.24i.com/articles/24i-hackathon-2022-two-amazing-days-of-teamwork-and-video-innovation. It showed me that 24i is full of talented professionals with surprising and innovative ideas. The judges had a hard time choosing the best of them, but in the end the Denmark team with a cool app idea won the big trophy. The top three teams each got to choose a charity that would receive their prize money. So after all, whoever won, it was all for a good cause.
What did you like the most about the hackathon?
Basically having a lot of fun with my colleagues. On the other hand, hackathons are like marathons where you are constantly proving to yourself: “You can do this!” We worked all night. You gain a second wind during the final pitching and after evaluation you feel exhausted, but truly satisfied.
What was your project about?
Our project ‘Delicate Fingers’ was about controlling TV by hand gestures. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for users to achieve standard functions like switching channels, turn the TV on/off and changing the volume. We liked this idea because it means less need for a remote control and less energy needs to be expended to interact with the TV. Also, we wanted to know more about neural networks and how they actually work. How can that network learn about recognizing your hand and fingers?
What was the biggest challenge while creating your project?
Definitely a neural network. There were some inconsistencies due to the lack of time and our team’s lack of some specialist knowledge, but after all it’s a hackathon. That’s why we chose this project – to learn something new. We faced big challenges during this event, but during the biggest challenges you are learning the most!
What lesson did you learn and what would you do differently?
I learned a lot about new technologies, including some that I had actually never even heard about before. For example communication with Smartphones and creating applications on TVs. What I would do differently next time is maybe to do a little bit more preparation. We wasted a lot of time trying to establish what technology would be best to fit in our project. But we learned a lot and are looking forward to new challenges. I can’t wait for the next Hackathon now.
