Third VK Hackathon took place in Saint Petersburg this weekend: 100 teams, 5 branches, 2 days of tireless work and 8 winners. Here's the scoop!

A recipe for an ideal hackathon

In essence, a hackathon is a competition in which a full cycle of product development, from idea to implementation, is done in an insanely short period of time and with a very small team. Therefore, it's usual practice to put lines of code before sleep at hackathons and the jury tends not to judge on the performance of the prototype.

Get a hundred or so IT-loving guys, lock them up for two days in a spacious loft with wi-fi and coffee, offer them cases that need to be solved (or give them creative carte blanche) and you're all set. In this environment, the craziest and freshest ideas come into existence. This is why hackathons are so appealing to companies from all over the world, including Russia.

For this hackathon, our partners were: Tretyakov Gallery, Tinkoff Bank, Selectel, UNESCO, Takie dela, CAF Russia, The Hermitage, Bolshoi Theatre, Afisha and Lentach. This set of organizers ensured a variety of categories: media, fintech, culture, charity and technical infrastructure.

Each category had its own specific cases. For example, helping people find someone to go to an event with, producing an effective tool for managing suggested posts in a popular media community or providing a way to shield teenagers from cyberbullying. The contestants could either choose from one of the problems presented or come up with something of their own.

Ideas and solutions

Working on a project before the clock starts is not good sportsmanship, so teams have to start from scratch, learning new API, drawing new interfaces and figuring out the user experience. Within a very limited time, the teams had to create the structure of their future project, develop the backend and client side and, most importantly, present their killer feature persuasively so that the jury would have no doubts that their product is just what the world needs.

The contestants were offered a plethora of choices: machine learning for recognising aggressive discussions, a platform for eSports tournaments, tinder for the Hermitage, an app for cryptocurrency… Neural networks, chatbots and augmented reality — the hottest IT trends played a big role in the majority of the Hackathon's projects. Integration with VK API was not mandatory, but we can proudly say that many teams decided to use it.

The vast majority of the participants preferred not to leave the loft during the Hackathon. Aside from working on their projects, the participants could also attend thematic round tables and presentations. We talked about the VK recommendations system, discussed advanced technology in art and met the world competitive programming champions.

The first round of selections consisted of the jury speaking one-on-one with the teams and determining 5 leading teams in each area. So in total, 25 lucky teams were chosen and given only 3 minutes to impress the audience with their presentations.

The cream of the crop

Presenting your project before a strict jury and vigilant competitors after many long hours of no sleep or rest is quite an achievement in our book. The teams gave wonderful presentations and faced hard questions from the audience to which they were quick to come up with arguments in support of their solutions.

Kudos, respect and an impressive amount prize money to the 8 winning teams. The prize pool totaled 1 million rubles. We had to choose winners in 5 areas and 3 special nominations. Let's meet the winners:

Charity
SNA. An instrument to determine a text's toxicity and identify aggression. At the heart of the project is a neural network, developed using real comments.

Media
Traffox. A solution for managing suggested news: automatic categorisation, post metrics prediction, text filtration and ways to encourage active authors.

Fintech
Evolve. Auction for VK communities. A system of bid freezes that allows for honest bidding.

Infrastructure
Spotter. A platform for smart IoT-device integration. Separation of user rights and a faster and more convenient device-management in a community by using a bot.

Culture
CyberPestsy HSE. Individual routes through the State Hermitage Museum, keeping a user's preferences in mind.

VK's choice
VO! A service for managing VK stores. Managing the products, tracking user orders, enabling payment transactions within chats.

Peer recognition
Nice Folks Out. Augmented reality for works of art, providing commentary and descriptions of museum paintings.

VK Hackathon 2017 Grand Prix
Nimax. An app for finding the optimal route for your trip to the museum, keeping queues and exhibition hall congestion in mind.

Till next time

These events are a great way to challenge yourself, meet new people and even jumpstart your IT career. Projects presented during hackathons frequently grow from a prototype into full functioning apps and services that are used by millions of people and the competitors will find it much easier to achieve success in such "battle-like" situations in the future.

This is our third time participating in the VK Hackathon. This event allows us to find interesting projects and startups and support them. Here, we look for new employees because these guys have already passed the first hurdle and are definitely worthy of our attention.

Selectel

The VK Hackathon was a success. We are thankful to all of our participants, volunteers, organisers and supporters! We are sure to meet again.