First Helsinki Hackathon was a success–check out the results!

My company (Onsight Helsinki) arranged together with Blue Meteorite the first Helsinki Hackathon event in Helsinki, January 15th. The main theme for the hackathon was to build a working solution using Office 365, especially with the Office 365 APIs and possibly also Microsoft Graph.

I was inspired to have a local hackathon after attending the European SharePoint Conference last November, and seeing the results and enthusiasm from attendees who attended the hackathon while there. There’s a chance to learn, spend a great evening with very knowledgeable people, and have pizza. What’s not to like?

The event started on Friday evening at 5 pm, and after a quick intro, we had Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft) and a fellow MCM, Erwin van Hunen (Rencore) present what development on Office 365 is all about. This provided a great gateway for people who are not intimately familiar with the possibilities and technical requirements for developing with the cloud, as well as a good recap for more seasoned developers.

We were fortunate enough to have Rencore (the guys behind the amazing SPCAF tool for SharePoint developers) support us, so we had some great swag to share for the attendees. Once again, thank you for supporting the community!

I had arranged two empty spaces from my office connected via an open doorway for the hackathon. The intention is to provide a seamless workspace, where teams can be dynamically established and communication flows freely during the evening. We also had a chance for hangarounds to attend, to better facilitate ideas and showcasing the solutions.

I know it’s a cliché but people need to eat also. 34 pizzas.

Some attendees chose to eat while coding

Picture by @niklasgrano

We gave teams about 3 hours for coming up with an ingenious solution, and hopefully, make it work. To give some extra motivation we arranged an Xbox One (1 terabyte model, of course) and a Lumia 950 (white!) for the top 2 teams as prizes.

We conducted the event in English, as I think it’s fair so that non-native Finnish speakers can also attend and share their knowledge and experiences.

The winning team was Team Smartwatch, with their solution that integrates Office Online’s Onenote notebooks with a Pebble smartwatch using JavaScript and the Office 365 APIs! You can find their solution on Github. This is the winning team after receiving their Xbox One:

Picture by @ahosenlasse

We finished the night with a group picture before heading to the nearby beer house for a few well-deserved pints.

In short, we went to #helhack and back!

PS. I’m planning another event after the winter holidays in March. Ping me if you’d be interested in sponsoring or providing help