Final Stretch in Jakarta
It's almost 2:00 pm on Sunday in Jakarta and we're on the last stretch of the coding marathon for the Space Apps Challenge. There's been a few changes to the schedule so now instead of three minutes, participants who are confident enough about their solutions to present will get up to 15 minutes. When it was announced this morning, you could totally see everyone breathing a sigh of relief.
Being involved in the Space Apps Challenge has been quite an experience. Despite having held several coding marathons in the past, this was the first one that DailySocial has organized that involved a transfer of location. Fortunately it didn't factor too much into the scheduling. Once the developers got to DailySocial's venue, they had all the space, Internet connection, food and soda that they need and wasted no time to get started.
The participants quickly broke out into groups, although some decided to ride solo. Later on we found out that despite looking like they were working on their own, the solo warriors were actually linking up with several others across the different sites thanks to having the PiratePad for each challenge which was fantastic!
When dinner time came, it didn't stop anyone from coding. In fact, we caught one person coding one handed while holding his dinner plate on the other!
Some of the challenges that were being worked on include Predict the Sky, Enviromap, Hazard Maps and My Travel Impact. Doing My Travel Impact is especially intriguing if it's meant for Indonesia because there isn't an integrated smart card system for travel. What the team did was try to come up with a mobile phone-based solution to determine the data needed to generate the results. We'll find out how far they progressed during the presentation session before the end of the day.
All in all, Space Apps Challenge has so far been a fascinating experience, seeing people across the globe work together in finding solutions for various issues and connecting an coordinating with them real time over various communications channels. Looking forward to the progress and results after the main event concludes.
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