Being the software enthusiasts we are, we saw it only fitting to sponsor one of the Shire’s most exciting tech competitions – Lincoln Hack 2017. This was the second edition of the Hack, following a successful debut last year and capped off the first Lincolnshire Tech Week.
What’s Lincoln Hack, you ask?
More than 80 of the county’s finest technophiles, plus some in-comers from other parts of the Country and even the Globe, come together in teams of up to 4 people to compete for a load of prizes. It all starts with an idea and the teams have 24 hours to nurture their concept into a masterpiece!
Getting a Slice of the Action
During the weekend, Andy Richley, our Marketing Manager and Lloyd Dew, one of our Support Technicians, represented the company at the coding event, held at the Boole Technology Centre on Lincoln University’s Science and Innovation Park, to get a feel of the action.
As one of the headline sponsors for the event, Andy took part in the Hack briefing, taking the competitors through our challenge (more on that below) and giving them a brief overview of why Khaos Control were supporting the Hack.
This was no ordinary event, think pyjamas in the afternoon, lemons powering Amazon’s Alexa, API JavaScript hacks, robots, and more madness!
Lloyd said: “I spent Sunday morning mingling with the teams and getting an idea of the hacks in development. At this point it was 23 hours into the event so there were many sleep deprived, energy drink-fuelled, programmers, techies and artists in the mix.
“There were loads of fantastic ideas pulling together different API’s to create unique products.”
Memorable Creations
Some of the highlights of the competitions included;
Kimagotchi; a web app using Twillo, Twitter API, JavaScript and Microsoft Azure. The idea was to train up Kim Jong Un using positive tweets about North Korea, feed him and hold military parades, which proved highly intuitive.
As well as The Anti-Trump (it’s already amazing); a JavaScript based app that reads Donald Trump’s twitter and re-phrases the tweet in a positive manner. Fascinatingly, it played memes and animations when certain topics were tweeted!
The Crown Jewel Challenge saw a company offering up £500 to anyone that could hack it’s secure servers within 12 hours. It took the challengers 16+ in the end, but they got in!
From techies coding in VR through to designers and creatives shooting video the Hack saw an amazingly wide range of skills and disciplines being deployed. All powered by the Lincoln Hack Team laying on catering, refreshments and encouragement throughout the event.
Khaos Control’s End of the World Challenge
Being a sponsor meant that the power was in our hands to come up with a theme and crown a winner for our own challenge. We chose, the very broad (but exciting), description of ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It’ – what could go wrong?
Lloyd explained: “All the teams presented their ideas just after the 24-hour mark. These were performed within 2 minutes and were all fantastic.”
All contenders for our challenge were brilliant, including a drone that would identify supplies and collect them using Lego robots and even an end of the world croquet game!
Although, the winning idea, accompanied by a winning team name, was The Adventure Game by ‘I’ll Code for Beer’. The guys managed to assemble a 1982 video game remaster of the BBC show. Using an Ableton pro as a controller (drum pad), the aim was to avoid the vortex and reach the end of the level. We hope they enjoy their HD action cameras!
“There were a lot of participants that went for our challenge and it was a difficult decision to make due to the high-quality ideas in play.”
The day ended on a positive note with all participants satisfied it was a successful event with Twitter and Slack bursting with encouragement!
Andy said: “Having been on board with the original event, it was great to see v2.0 attracting even more participants and sponsorship. Rob, Shaun and the Lincoln Hack team have created an awesome event and we cannot wait for the next one.”
Feel like you missed out? Search #LincolnHack17 on Twitter to catch up on all of the highlights.
Would you like to learn more about the Khaos Control Family and the opportunities we have here in Grantham? Click through!