My experience with a 24 hour sitecore hackathon 2016

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Last year, Sudeep and I attended a 24 hour sitecore hackathon. We teamed up and called our team red Staffy.  I have a fur baby and his name is Cookie, that's why I came up with this name. By the time we teamed up, Sudeep hasn't had his Oscar. Otherwise, our team name would be different. Sudeep is detail oriented and has a competitive personality. Which every team needs to have someone like him. We both attend hackathons for fun and learning experience. Although, we don't hide that we enjoy winning and getting recognized but that's not our main motivation.

On the hackathon day, We notified about the competition categories. We all knew it will be about habitat but no one knew what we have to implement and what would be theme of  competition.

There were three category that we could pick up from

1- Building new Feature module for habitat
2- Creating an integration to a 3rd party system in the Habitat.
3- Building new UI site for habitat

you can read more details here.



Our challenges:

1- find an idea for the module which we can finish it in short amount of time and show case our knowledge
2- find a way to share our code privately, since each of attending remotely from home  
3- find a way to communicate and share files and ask questions
4- find a way to screen cast our end result and submit it

Our solutions:

1- Time boxed our ideation and discussed pros and cons of each idea and picked one idea that we both felt comfortable with and focused on it .
2- We created a private repository on bitbucket . You can create private repo on bitbucket use it up to 5 users for free free. We split tasks and try to mange to work on separate tasks to avoid merge conflicts 
3- we used slack for communication and file sharing
4- Believed it or not we waste some time to find a free screen casting app than we can use and upload our demo on youtube. finally we found https://screencast-o-matic.com/

We decided to go with the first option and build Events Feature. This feature allows content editors to create events in sitecore backend. Content editors can add calendar module on any page to display events in calendar or add link to the list of events page. Each event has it’s own detail page. On event detail page web site visitors can see venue of the event on Google Maps and they would be able to add the event into their calendar (icalendar, google calendar, outlook. outlook online, yahoo calendar). All of renderings are responsive. This feature also helps web site marketers and events organizers to see popular events and analyse interest on each event based on number of people add the event in their calendar.

If you are interested you can see our source here
https://github.com/Azadehkhojandi/Habitat

Also you can watch our demo on youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abs7W2kKTHs&feature=youtu.be&hd=1
https://youtu.be/j0Fi62Zw_xQ


Winning teams:

Both Sudeep and I tried our best and hoped for good outcome. We both were thrilled when we heard community judges liked our solution and idea. You can read more about winning teams here.

If you haven't signed your team up for sitecore hackathon 2017 yet. There is still time and you can register your team here.  Unfortunately,Sudeep is on holiday and he couldn't attend the hackathon. Luckily, Zhen and Budi were interested and now we have full team. Looking forward to compete against your team in two weeks.

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