Hi. I spent the last weekend with my team at online hackathon that was set in Qaragandy. Here is my feedback on it (very opinionated).

My team.

My team consisted of amazing people: Bek, Daryn and Darkhan (dream team isn't it). We procrastinated a lot and have done most of the job the last 6 hours. In the end the experience was amazing and we worked on the project 12 hours a day together.

The case.

The case was really weird considering the fact it didn't even seem like a case. It was more like a task to complete so sponsors could use it in production. I and my team selected the 2nd case about building a forum for pregnant mothers to get feedback from specialists as fast as possible. There were a lot of criterias, such as gallery, marketplace, user profile etc. everything in Russian with fancy design in 2 days 🥳. We eventually made it but didn't win for the reason they're not revealing.

The organization is terrible.

I understand that this is an online hackathon and sponsors had to deal with offline teams, but still, the cases were as if the organizators didn't even know what a hackathon means. They were just project criterias and everybody struggled a lot to fit into them.

Time management

We had a time schedule that was just a word doc. This is like the worst option that neither notifies participants nor organizes them.

Webex

What is webex? We had to install it just for these meetings. Why not use Google Meet or Zoom? Webex! Inconvenient.

The judges.

Apparently we noticed that all winners of the med. hackathon were participating offline which means judges might not been listening to online teams. I can say that because our team had a working MVP both website and mobile app and still teams with drawings of pregnant women managed to win.

The results.

Results are still unknown to this day. The organizators won't reveal details, feedback from judges or just answer questions. Complete ignore. This is already a sign of injustice in my opinion.