HACKATHON

Our first hackathon… wow! What an experience!

Before I say anything else let me just break the myth that geeks are boring. Even if they are, this bunch knew the fine art of balancing work and play.

So for those of you reading who are not sure exactly what a hackathon is (it’s nothing to be embarrassed about I wasn’t sure about it myself), it’s an event where programmers (cool geeks) come together to use codes (the language that they understand) to create really amazing applications that everybody can use.

Thanks to ‘smsgh’ the oneshot team was invited to this exclusive world of developers, who at this event, were supposed to use an API developed by the developers of Mpower so they could develop new applications. So while the programmers were working under this particular project, the API of MPower, the idea was for each team to be able to work on whatever they wanted. Yep, very techy stuff! And contrary to ideas floating in my head no one had the time to hack into anyone else’s app to sabotage the other group. They were team players.

Developers worked from coffee cup to dinner plate at ‘ispace Ghana’ and after the applications were developed and the 1^st prize of 2,000 Ghana Cedis was snatched, to ensure that these amazing apps will be finished (for those who couldn’t finish) and launched, smsgh put up an additional total of 2,000 Ghana Cedis (GHC500 per group) to any group who could finish the app, pass it through rigorous testing platforms and launch it within a 14 day period.

And my, the view from the top of ispace…

Amazing things happening in GH.