I would like to share some of my experience and impressions of taking part in “Windows Phone 7 Rocks!” Hackathon in Lviv.

 

First of all, many thanks to the organizers of this event and to the sponsors. Event was really great. Everyone got presents, food and joy of playing kinect at free time and of course tons of intensive coding. Hackathon started with helpful and resourceful presentations delivered by organizers. Two of them were about stuff I think wp7 developer must know – metro design and publishing to marketplace. And I would like to correct myself by replacing “developer” with “Ukrainian developer”, thing is, it is not easy for my country to be appreciated by Microsoft. Other two were about working with data in Mango and augmented reality. Ah.. and forgot to mention that everyone got styling wp7 t-shirt, finally I’ve got one! Awesome!

I hardly remember any other day when I had such intensive programming time. Not to say that I didn’t have sleepless all-night coding, but I was somewhat relaxed, making tea time to time surfing internet when realizing that copy-paste is no longer working. It was different, it was team play.

As you may know at the moment I work on enterprise WP7 project and my team has 8 developers. 6 of us took part in the Hackathon which formed 2 Hackathon teams. I cannot express well enough how much this night made us more closer to each other and how extreme team-building it was. But I strongly ensure you that it worth each minute we spent together coding two great ideas to be presented next day. During the night we did 125 commits to the source-control (4:59PM first commit and 11:22AM last commit). Can you imagine such productivity of the hired people? Never. Of course no one can work such intensive for long time.

So here we are:

6 most closest people. Sorry for two of them not looking at you and for me also – I’m busy.

On Monday our scrum master sent congratulation to us and here is how it looks like:

Hold on for a second. Winners? Yeap! But wait for a second. First things first.

At the moment there are no presentations available in the internet or video, so I cannot say much about other teams. Hopefully I will update this blog post soon. But I can remember many great applications developed by others, such as handy cartoon-creator, quest generator and player, travel places logger, guitar tuner, ball game, and many other nice applications. 3 of us created “real-problem” solving application – “WC Emergency”, which by it’s idea exploded auditory: when you really have “need”, you start app and answer 2 basic questions “How long can you wait?” and “How fast can you run?” after which you get the most reachable WC.  Some other team even managed to create 3D game, to the last moment I thought they will take first place. For the complexity they probably deserve first place, but…

 

After which you get selection for the single player or multiplayer mode:

 

For the single player you can play with blue-red balls or can load images instead of blue or read ones. Here single player simple mode:

 

Idea is simple – you keep friends on the battle-field and throw enemies out of it. Physics for two-kinds is different, I will keep it in secret.

But joy begins whey you selected multiplayer, took pictures for your team (faces cropped) here:

 

Found other guy willing to play with you. He takes pictures for his team on his phone (!). Game starts and you both have all pictures. You throw his guys and keep yours, he does the same for his team.

 

That angry bomb also has something to do with the game, but it is secret.

I think me and Taras managed to impress people when we started taking photos of them and playing with those in front of the auditory. Great that we had server-side coverage by Roman.

I bet this gave us new emotions and inspiration for the future. We also got HTC Mozart phone as present.

Everyone was really pleased and despite those sleepless-red-eye-faces it was clearly seen that no one was disappointed of spending 24h non-stop coding.