Kittens, Teams and Laptops

The last few tickets

A couple of days ago social media was graced with our furry friends, who announced that there were just a few tickets remaining for the hackathon on 15 & 16 June 2024. Assuming that there were two handfuls of tickets left on Thursday just gone, then we are now down to one handful!

Any tickets left? Please tell us there are tickets left! Can we still get tickets?

If one of your friends or colleagues wants to come along, then now is the time to grab those final attendee tickets, we are talking about single digits! There is a separate ticket list for organisers and sponsors, so this news is just for regular participants who want to hack. Get your ticket now!

Naturally, we’d be happy to accommodate another sponsor or two on the VIP list.

Once all of the regular tickets have been taken there will be a waiting list in operation. If you later discover that you cannot make it, please return your ticket (via the Eventbrite page) and we will release it to people on the waiting list.

Team work

The Great Hall at UEL is massive, and it easily seats 100 people. We anticipate that teams of four will be the norm, and the sponsors are planning to have prizes in clusters of four. Other team configurations are fine, just remember that if you win one of the challenges, then there are four prizes for the winning team.

You can arrive with friends with your team configuration already in mind, or you can agree something on the day. If you’re expecting somebody to be in your team, and they don’t have a ticket, they won’t be allowed in! Be sure that you each have a ticket. Check with them now!

Seeking collaborators

For those who are completely new to this there will be guidance, and after the challenges are announced (at about 10.30am on the Saturday) there will be some helpers and dialogue to connect you with would be collaborators. Non standard team sizes are fine, though groups of four tend to work best. Be ready to discuss your skill sets, your ideas, and indicate who would be an asset in your team. Perhaps “a couple of these, one of those, and somebody with a working knowledge of time machines”. At least one of your team is going to end up on stage doing a 3 minute presentation of what you’ve built (and why it should win a prize). You can all go on stage if you like, it’s just normal for one or two team members to actually demo the hack. And you have only 3 minutes to showcase it.

We’d like you to tackle one of the set challenges and be eligible for a prize. There will be at least four challenges on offer. Your hack is to be new, unwritten and original at 12 noon on the Saturday, and be ready 24 hours later at 12 noon on the Sunday.

Premeditated thought is OK, but writing code in advance is not allowed! Team names are up to you, and the more amusing the better. Remember, the theme of the Hackathon is “go out and do some good in the world” and your hack should adopt this ethic.

What to bring to the event

Each cluster of tables has four chairs and is provided with 240v electricity via a trailing cable with four sockets. You will need to bring your own laptop and charger (and any phone chargers too). Just be aware that it’s an old building and even though the wiring is modern, there are not many outlets. They won’t cope with 100 devices plugged in all at the same time. Some power sharing arrangement needs to be agreed amongst the members of each team. Please arrive with a fully charged laptop so that you can help your team mates manage demand.

The University wifi is provided in conjunction with their IT partner Sky. It takes about 7 clicks to set up an account for The Cloud if you don’t already have one. It’s robust and can cope with hundreds of students. But please don’t hog all the bandwidth!

Attendees with pre existing eduroam or govroam accounts will find that those networks are also available.

The stage will be used on the Sunday afternoon for presentations to the judges. The projector takes an HDMI input. If your laptop needs a dongle, then please bring your own dongle to connect to the HDMI cable provided. The AV facility on the stage also has a visualiser. In theory that should allow you to place a mobile phone under the viewer and everybody can see it on the big screen. This is one of the things that the team will be checking when they do the next venue visit.

Thanks to our sponsors Proactive, dxw, Infobip and Jamie+Lion it’s going to be good!