In late February of this year, Sendwithus hosted our second annual AI hackathon competition sponsored by Heroku. I helped out with some of the registration and mentoring at this year’s event held at the University of Victoria in the Engineering & Computer Science building. It was a tonne of fun and I had a blast helping students. During the actual development part of the competition, we had a few of the lecture halls on the first floor of the ECS building which proved handy for teams to break out and develop their snake AI.
Seeing so many people collaborating towards one goal was an experience for me that I won’t soon forget. Being the first hackathon I’ve attended, it was interesting to see so many students come together in such an interactive environment to build a cool project. I was able to help some of the students get their development environments setup and running, as well as introduce some handy advice for making development easier for them by using ngrok and command line tools.
Around 96 students showed up to participate with some corporate teams participating as well involving various startups in the area. The main lecture hall was basically full when the final game was going on and some local press showed up to give us some TV time.
I snapped a few pictures here and there as well, along with some images taken by Dylan on our team.
Battlesnake
Battlesnake
Brandon helping out at Battlesnake
Battlesnake
Sendwithus team relaxing during the student dev time
Battlesnake
Altogether the whole thing was a fantastic, exhausting, good time and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Hopefully next year we can bring double the crowd and make an event you’d regret missing!