Hackathon for good – Las Vegas stories
What happens in Vegas – leaves you inspired for a long time
Hackathon for good – Las Vegas stories
Couple of years back, I was lucky enough to be invited to a hackathon for good, a side event in AWS Re:Invent. The most memorable work trick I’ve ever had started from Los Angeles airport, from where we rented a car to ride towards Las Vegas.
A week in one of the biggest conferences in the world – having over 65,000 participants – literally blew my mind.
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Insightfull trip with few side notes
AWS Re:Invet gathers professionals from cloud computing domains from across the whole world. I’ve been in the tech industry for over a decade now, and especially in my early career, I kind of used to be working with predominantly males.
During the last decade the industry has been slowly diversifying – admittedly still most women entering business as designers, HR managers or project managers, not developers – I was honestly truly shocked how in an audience of hundreds, few times thousands of people, there were just a handful, often times lot less than 2-3% women.
It’s commonly known that diverse people bring diverse thinking – with this notion in mind the industry has still great measures to grow.
Hands on, sweat, soda and tired eyes.
Before travelling to Las Vegas, out team had get-together, where we rehearsed with few subjects, fine-tuned our team dynamics, discussed about roles and preferences in tasks and got to know about tools and platforms which we might need during the hackathon. We discussed about the subject given earlier and I made some design templates which could come handy in a compressed time frame.
The last day of the conference week was the NPO Hackathon for social good proposed by Goodwill Industries. Luckily it was after some days of adjusting, so that most of us had recovered form jetlag strain.
The timeframe for the hackathon was 12 hours, which was intense. We heard the pitches for the different paths, brainstormed, ideated, draw, coded, prepared presentation, pitched the presentation for each other, and some of us managed to eat something in between.
What a 12 hours to spend!
On the stroll, tour the wedding chapel street
The week in Vegas was hectic, orienteering among tens of thousands of other people from sessions to another, constant, never-ending noise of slot machines and people gabing in a jet lag. It was a lot take in.
After the intense Hackathon day, we went for a city stroll away for the noise. The wedding chapel street walks brought a nice breeze of calming down, and brought layers of history present to the modern day.
We had a blast in the downtown, Fremont Street in the heart of Old Vegas. Fremont is a vibrant, bubbling center of entertainment, music, food, drinks, and fun.
I also send a postcard home, being unaware of it’s glittery ‘Just got married’ text on the side, which did cause some supprised eyebrow rises when the card got home.