Hackathon at Zfort Group

Last weekend, from June 30 to July 01 the ninth Ukraine-wide Hackathon from the famous developers' portal DOU took place in our office. This is an interesting and rather unusual event that aims to create of a working application or a hack within 24 hours and demonstrate of the ready product to the participants.

Zfort Group's office was selected a hosting partner of the event. We were happy to shelter developers from all corners of Ukraine in our cosy conference-hall. The first guests started coming early on the Saturday morning. As a result, more than 40 participants, who were divided into 14 teams, took part in the event. After an official opening, the participants choose their working places and started coding.

Ping-pong table and game room with playstation that enjoyed great popularity helped to periodically switch over from hard work. Toward midnight, in the friendly atmosphere of the gathering, the guitar became widely used, which added a zest to the meeting of web developers from all over Ukraine.

Till 4 a.m. the most persistent continued work and at 8 a.m already everybody was at the office. After delicious dinner at the restaurant “Flying Up Dragon” the guys returned to the office to continue their presentations.

All the teams received ovations of the audience during their presentations. Browser tanks, online monopoly, Avagram (analogue of Instagram) and many other useful and original ideas initiated discussions of all the participants and guests of the Hackathon.

For your attention 3 winners:

1. Mono-fuse.

When at the beginning of the event, two project authors, a married couple from Kharkov,  introduced their project to the audience, not many were interested in it, but in the voting process they were supported by everybody. And the substance of the project is as follows: assemble MongoDB as a virtual file system. Meanwhile, databases are folders, collections (tables' analogue) are subfolders, and the documents (analogue of rows) are ordinary files! And the most pleasant is, as this is an ordinary file system for the environment, all Unix-utilities like grep, sed, etc. work fine with it.

FUSE http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace and Python were used when creating the project. The source code can be found at: https://github.com/silver-/mongo-fuse

2. Metautocomplete.

We all write all sorts of texts using computer or when communicating via the network and everybody could have a situation when the next word can't be found in our mind. The project Metautocomplete was created to solve such situations. This is an automatic completion of phrases, but the hint here is the fact that this can be any data, and the user can choose it himself. For that it is necessary to download a text document which will be analyzed and written in the database. If you want to write as Shakespeare, that's not a problem at all.

The guys used MongoDB database + MadReduce, Yii Framework and the custom version was made as an extension for Chrome browser. That's such a pleasure that one of the team participants is Zfort Group's employee – Roman Pronskiy.

3. Breaking Word Mania.

The author hacked a popular game for iPhone/iPad. The essence of the game – there's a grid with size 4x4, every cell has a letter. The player's task is to make words, logically uniting the letters. The following approach has been used: a screenshot of the playing field has been made, the image analyzed and the letters identified. As the same letter in different cells looked differently, an algorithm of indistinct comparison was used. Getting the grid, the author used a fast algorithm of words search and drew a path at the computer monitor. Everything was made using Java.

These are 3 winners of the ninths DOU Hackathon that was held in Zfort Group's office:

We will happily host the similar events in the future. We wish all the participants to continue the realization of their projects and receive recognition from the IT community. Good-bye for the moment! :)