Winners

The theme of the Barcamp London Hackathon on 15-16 June 2024 was “go out and do some good in the world”. And nearly 100 people attended with the intention of doing just that.

With four challenges on offer, the 24 hour period between 12 noon on the Saturday, and 12 noon on the Sunday, saw 16 teams who worked hard building software hacks. Aged from 16 to 60+ the coders built some amazing projects. Some of them were simply stunning given the time available. And they were authentic. The organisers and the guest judges dropped in on all the teams on a regular basis, and can certify that the material was entirely new and original and did not exist prior to the commencement of hacking at 12 noon on the Saturday.

A good deal of collaboration took place. People who had never met before formed teams, used their complementary skills, and were aided by the sponsors who guided them on the use of their datasets and APIs. Some teams of friends worked together and a handful of solo efforts ably demonstrated that some “full stack” developers can indeed build a full stack prototype in 24 hours.

Most remarkable was Team [Placeholder] consisting of six undergraduate students. Yes, you read that correctly! Firstly, yes the team name was “Team open square bracket Placeholder close square bracket”, and secondly, yes there were six of them. That’s fine! Teams are normally four strong, the sponsors normally bring four prizes, so let’s just hope that they don’t win something!

Presentations took place throughout the Sunday afternoon, with silly prizes on offer during the Hackathon Bingo. The intervention of the mystery micro sponsor brought a cheer. The Sticky Bun Man turned up with a vast array of muffins and cakes, pastries and chocolate for all to share. A massive sugar boost mid afternoon for a room full of developers who were already sufficiently hyped anyway!

Infobip – The Digital Communication Challenge

Using the Infobip API, the Hack Street Boys built an app called Mindvibe which brings you the latest positive and uplifting news. They used not only the Infobip API, but managed to include the OpenAI API, and web scraping APIs Firecrawl and Scrapegraph to build a truly impressive working demo.

Guest presenter Sidd V stood in at the last minute to award the team their clicky mechanical keyboards.

dxw – The Environment Challenge

Nicky Thompson from dxw, and Paul Newman from Southwark Borough Council present the prize for the use of their air quality data. A bag of goodies, containing a first aid kit and schwag.

Congratulations to Team Brandon for the hack Forecast Art Poster Wallpaper. It’s amazing what can be done with an SVG image, a little CSS, and a handy bit of JavaScript from vue js.

Proactive – The Health & Fitness Challenge

The unmistakeable Proactive Paul, an avid runner, was impressed by Team Wonderful Wizard. The Steel Dragons App logs the locations of exercise machinery in your local parks and other public spaces, and logs your visits and performance.

Claiming the regular achievement of 100 sit ups and 100 press ups, the Wonderful Wizard gave a fault free demonstration of the voice recognition feature which enabled the user to log performance on a mobile device. A worthy winner of four ( ? ) blood pressure meters, but he has only two arms!

And he later confirmed that it was 100 in total, not 100 plus 100!

The Community – The Open Source Challenge

The bias for teams of “not four people”, and the existence of some smaller winning teams, solved a conundrum when it came to the winners of the Open Source challenge.

Team [Placeholder]. All six of them!

Their Inform UK hack relied on the Parliament API, Democracy Club API, and ONS data to help local voters to make decisions based on local candidates and their local policies.

Terence Eden presented the excessively large team with four robot car kits, one clicky keyboard, one blood pressure meter, and one first aid kit. The jumbled combination of prizes was well received with each team member having exactly what they wanted. A certain level of serendipity did that, and so did a healthy dose of cheek (you know who you are), and it all resulted in a perfect and well deserved outcome.

Spirit of the Hack

Boxes of Lego and a spare box of Lego Mindstorms went to teams that didn’t quite win a main prize, but who impressed the judges with their resilience and commitment. Particulary when your laptop screen has suddenly failed and you have to source a spare monitor when you’re miles away from home.

Richly deserved credit for enthusiasm and whole hearted participation went to Team Framework Whisperer and Team Billy No Mates and Team Shady McBallot!

The best team name award

There were some great names too. It was a close call to establish the winner.

The Hack Street Boys all went away with some Crunky sweets!

Fun and challenging

So much happened that weekend. The sponsors went the extra mile. The organisers were constantly problem solving, and hacking recalcitrant hardware.

The power of good communication and co-operation were extolled. The presenting was tough work, very tough, and we all coped with it stoically. The patience of everybody was tested to the limit. And an abundance of courtesy and kindness was evident.

As organisers, we would like to do the same thing again.

And do it bigger, and better, and friction free.

Thank you to all who came along. And a big thank you to all our sponsors!