I recently took part in the Hacktivate launch event. I was joined by a couple of colleagues/friends: Ian Patterson and Kylie Xie. Together we made up the Orion Health team, though the event wasn’t a company specific affair.

A quick summary of what was involved: 6 teams took part, and each had to write a bot to play a modified version of battleship, (yep as in “you sunk my battleship” battleship), and we had about 5 - 6 hours to write the bots. After the bots were written they’d take part in a brutal bot on bot tournament with one bot rising as champion from the ashes of its fallen foes. The fighting was visualized like a video game, so you got ships shooting at each other and explosions and all that groovy stuff. A whole lot of people arrived around 7pm to watch the bots duke it out, and we got to sit there in from of the crowd and rep our code.

The event was pretty rad! First and foremost, my teammates were rad. The outcome of our work felt greater than the sum of its parts. I don’t always feel that this is the case, but I certainly felt it here. Aside from having more hands to code with there were a few (non-exhaustive) things I think went well:

• Each person having their own prior skills and knowledge, with our own spins.
• Being able to split the research, and research using different methodologies.
• Talk through ideas, bringing our different perspectives.

It was also rad that Ruth James invited me along to the event – I’m certain I would not have gone were it not for her. So big shout outs to my team and Ruth.

I thought the format was rad. I enjoyed that it took place over a single day, which felt like the right amount of time. It meant the event could fit into my schedule, and I didn’t feel burnt out afterwards. The challenge itself felt like a good size. We were given enough code upfront that we could hit the ground running and start attacking interesting bits. The problem felt like you couldn’t breeze through it in the time given, but it also didn’t feel insurmountable.

We were given 30 minutes from winning our semi-final in which we could update our code before the final. I was tentative about making changes

It was rad to win (spoilers, we won). Of course it feels good to win, but it was also really cool to see other talented teams doing their thing. It was weird, awesome, and nerve wracking, amongst other things, to have our code do battle in front of a crowd of people. The finals ended up being an insane nail biter, which was pretty anxiety inducing, but also very cool.

All in all it was pretty rad. A combination of working with an awesome team, on an interesting problem, and the team’s radical awesomeness being vindicated? What’s not to like?