Tech - Doin it Right

I recently participated in a Hackathon organized at my company. While, I am not at liberty to tell what the hack was, I can share the experience though.

We all usually have ideas brimming about how we could improve or change things. A lot of times, one does not get the time to act on those ideas. Sometimes, these ideas require time, people, resources, money etc. 

Our Hackathon got off to a great start with music by Daft Punk - 'Doin it Right'. It certainly set the tempo.

Focus
It is easy to get carried away with the ideas. Learn to focus on the idea. Once, you have something in mind, explore it in more detail and flesh it out. Bounce the idea around with different people to get various perspectives. Perhaps, you may fall in love with the it or just drop it. If you must, fail quickly and learn from it.

Team
Unless, you are planning to go it solo, get a great team. Ensure that there are diverse skills, experiences, even temperaments. The most fun you will have is in building the hack. While doing that there will be differences and much consternation. Trust me, that is the fun part. I had a great time with four other guys in our team. I was surprised that we had the stamina to work continuously for 24 hours!

Tenacity
Now, comes the hard part. Don't give up even if things don't work or you are behind schedule. I am reminded of the honey badger in 'Gods Must Be Crazy' movie, it wouldn't let go even after being dragged across the desert! If you have a great team, you will be amazed at what you can create. Keep an eye on the clock though and ensure you have something working by the end.

If you ever get a chance to participate in a Hackathon, don't lose the opportunity. It is about bringing ideas to life.

One last thing. Our team won the Hackathon! I suppose we did it right!
Left to Right - Me, Amar, Shyam, Raghavendra & Ashoka

Location: Bangalore, Karnataka, India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cloudera Quick Start VM in Hyper-V

Image
Overview Marc Andreessen penned his now famous essay, “ Why Software Is Eating the World ” in Wall Street Journal in 2011. However, if we dig under the covers, it's really virtualization that is powering this phenomenon. Today, literally every hardware component such as - processor, memory, network, storage, network load-balancer, network router and switch, firewall are virtualized. In fact, even a user is now "virtualized" especially in scenarios such as load testing and synthetic monitoring. Finally, as a concept, money is also virtualized in the form of crypto-currencies. In this post, let's go through how we can implement virtualization in a local machine and get better understanding of the concepts of virtualization.  Virtualization  One key aspect, driver and benefit of virtualization is sharing of the physical resources.  Before we dive in, let's define some concepts. Host Machine - This can be a server rack, single server or a desktop/lapto
Read more

Book Review - The Price of Being Fair

Image
Overview  As the FairPrice group in Singapore completes 50 years, "The Price of Being Fair" book is a timely story of it's birth and evolution. The book has been authored by Sue-Ann Chia and Shing Huei Peh. While being true to history, the book has nuggets of "behind the scenes" information, given the time the authors have spent with various leaders at FairPrice. The book is already a best seller according to Kinokuniya book store. At under 200 pages, it makes for a breezy read. The Usual Suspects Having worked in retail industry for over two decades, the travails of  NTUC FairPrice seem familiar to me. A retail CEO once remarked that retail is a pretty "public" industry. There is not much behind which a retail business can hide. As such, retailers often have to follow the aspirations and concerns of the communities and customers they serve. The journey of FairPrice from being an EDLP (everyday low price) retailer to one having multiple formats, busin
Read more

Azure Chronicles - VM Security

Using the cloud has many benefits, some of them such as elasticity and scalability. On the other hand, some other aspects such as security and cost need to be paid attention to. Let's look at the security aspect in this post. Lynis is one of the most popular Linux auditing and hardening tools. It has community and enterprise editions. As an example, the community edition is being used here. Let's scan a Linux based VM in Azure and find out the results. This post assumes that you have an existing subscription in Microsoft Azure. The below steps show how to scan a VM in Azure. A new class of VM's called B1ls was launched. These VM's are quite small and cheap. As this is just an experiment, let's try this new VM. Create a B1ls VM with the Ubunto 18.04 LTS image on it. Make sure that the VM has a public IP address and use a public key for access. Once the VM is created, login to the VM using a tool such as Putty. Follow the steps described here to ins
Read more