Hackathons

Grow into a major player in the global blockchain space with an innovative mindset.

The concept of a digital economy has rewritten business models you’ve adopted so far. Over 90 percent of organizations want a digital transformation strategy, anticipating cost reduction, increased innovation, and business growth in the future. It doesn’t matter if you are talking about products, services, technology, culture, or data; everything revolves around delivering value to customers and thwarting competitors.

And the booming blockchain technology has quite the same objectives.

With the technology still being in its infancy, people are unsure about how to make inroads. This post aims to convince the reader that whether it is a city, an organization, or an individual, an innovative mindset seems to be the answer to adjusting course and deriving maximum value.

What is blockchain technology?

An open, decentralized database that keeps a record of all digital transactions across a peer-to-peer network—that’s blockchain. All members with access to the network can view and validate the transactions using cryptographic keys, without a third party, such as a bank. The computers in the network are called nodes. This shared database with a secure audit trail is hard to tamper with. Blockchain is expected to tackle challenges such as duplication and control of information.

To understand how blockchain works, watch this great video from IBM using the diamond industry as an example:

Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, and Ethereum, a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts, are perhaps the most famous examples.

How can your company start implementing blockchain?

If you’ve decided that using blockchain will expand frontiers for you, then what next?

According to Deloitte, there are six key steps for companies to get started with blockchain:

• Inspiration (interact with think tanks or labs like MIT Media Lab)
• Education (gather information about practical implementation)
• Ideation (generate ideas, categorize, and prioritize)
• Collaboration (test and refine ideas with leading industry people)
• Prototyping (create a rapid or breadboard prototype)
• Implementation (critical, testing and validation phase)

Studies show that it doesn’t matter whether a country or a company wants to leverage blockchain, an entrepreneurial and innovative mindset is a key prerequisite. Ideation is a crucial step, where you can expect action when your ideation is effective. Get engaged employees to improve the existing capabilities or discover new possibilities using blockchain to unlock new use cases.

To make innovation in this space happen, companies typically look for implementation of ideas within or partner with vendors. Budding blockchain startups in the fintech ecosystem need backing in terms of capital, skills, mentorship, and infrastructure. Whereas, legacy companies tie up with accelerators to better their impact and reach. BFSI institutions and other firms are forming alliances, sponsoring innovation labs, and creating incubator programs on several platforms.

Scott Robinson from Plug and Play, a startup accelerator and open innovation platform, says that accelerators, incubators, and hackathons “show very quickly if a use case is something that makes sense for large corporations and they paint a pathway to matriculate the technology into the [legacy player’s] tech team.”

Many banks and other financial institutions are using hackathons to explore this emerging technology. Also, blockchain companies are struggling to encourage widespread adoption, especially when trying to reach the management of incumbents. Startups that are blockchain enthusiasts find that hackathons can give them that much-needed access to corporates in the financial domain, and the latter can work with these experts to make the most of blockchain. Companies also participate in hackathons for the wonderful networking opportunities they offer.

A hackathon, which involves all the six steps Deloitte talks about, is a great tool to discover talent and develop breakthrough products or services. The highly focused event leverages an innovative mentality and the right skills to augment the value chain. Crowdsourcing ideas from developers could be the only way for now to find financial solutions using this potentially disruptive technology.

Chainhack, Dutch Blockchain Hackathon, Blockchain Virtual GovHack, Hyperledger Hackathon, and Consensus are a few popular hackathons that drive home the point that Ishmael Malik, CEO of Blockchain Lab, makes: “Blockchain and Hackathons are poised to redefine the entire tech innovation lifecycle, accelerating by orders of magnitude technological progress.”

Then there is ether.camp (a recurring virtual hackathon), which “is a project aimed to create the ideal innovation environment for startups by utilising blockchain technology for the release of the Virtual Accelerator.”

Malik adds: “The future of such Hackathon-led innovation as highlighted by IBM and Intel in relation to the HyperLedger Hackathon, illustrates the ability for such a format in harnessing, showcasing and market testing new advancing technologies. Furthermore, it allows for previously untapped hacker skill sets to form into teams and generate innovative new ideas and products.”

Why now is the time to explore and invest in blockchain

This foundational distributed ledger technology is a mini-revolution all right.

Blockchain researcher Bettina Warburg says in her great TED talk, human beings keep trying to lower uncertainty to exchange value. Just as formal institutions such as banks or governments do according to American economist Douglass North. And just as blockchain technology will transform our economy by reducing uncertainty in not knowing who you are dealing with, not having visibility into a transaction, and not having recourse…to an extent.

Once you have understood the applications of blockchain and its implications for your business, you need to explore its potential and find a challenge that can be solved. That is, identify a use case → build a proof of concept → do a field trial → roll out.

Asset transactions are immutable and secure, and this opens up several avenues for innovation, either in the underlying technology or in the possible use cases of the technology that were previously unfathomable. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination as of now. (Read about some interesting things you can do with blockchain here.)

Accenture predicts that the adoption of blockchain by the financial services sector will be in the growth phase from 2018 to 2024 and by 2025, it will hit maturity. Capital market spending on this technology, which was $30M in 2013, is expected to touch $400M by 2019. While Gartner says a blockchain business will be worth $10B by 2022.

Although the adoption of this disruptive technology is growing, it will be some time before the fledgling goes mainstream. “But no doubt the application of blockchain will drive the fourth industrial revolution,” says Thomas J. Carroll, Avant Global’s Chief Information Officer. Eventually, innovative solutions will emerge to tackle the scalability, security, interoperability, and privacy issues of blockchain.

Trying to find an example of the “walking a thin line” idiom is easy. Think of HR managers who have to align company goals and employee satisfaction!

HR leaders no longer just stick to legal and compliance issues; they are now strategic business partners with a key role to play in shaping the company’s culture and taking the company closer to realizing its vision.

The talent management and performance review processes are certainly not what we’d refer to as all in a day’s work. To add to their cup of woes, they have “mundane” tasks—finding top quality hires, retaining them, ensuring there are no pains areas in employee engagement, staving off all kinds of legal hassles—which require them to be the go-to person while being innovative, proactive, and brimming with energy.

Apparently, this is possible.

Thanks to the digital era, the market is now flooded with tools, apps, and processes to help HR pros kick back and relax. For instance, HR innovation was the theme of the successful “Hack the Experience” hackathon sponsored by Brilliant Ink. The event held in San Francisco in 2014 drew over100 professionals collaborated to come up with solutions to improve employee engagement.

Hackathons—an underrated tool

Hackathons can give you the vision. You can create employee experiences that are compelling and fun. These high-energy events are much more than people working collaboratively on a brilliant idea using software and hardware to solve a problem. Let’s see how.

80% of Fortune 100 companies use hackathons to drive innovation. You too can! Learn how

Expect the unexpected

Who hasn’t been guilty of failing to recognize talent right under the nose? It happens.

You can fix this. Conduct an internal hackathon to assess your company’s existing employee pool. You will be amazed at the “hacks” your employees can come up with.

Tech companies benefit greatly from holding hackathons for its developers where they have to think outside the box and prove their mettle under time and problem constraints.

“It can also provide good clues on design sensibilities, presentation skills and team collaboration ability of the engineer,” says Ravi Gururaj, chairman of the Nasscom Product Council.

And how right he is.

HR managers should advise team leads to gauge the competency of their team members before putting in requests for urgent hires.

“If you’re inside a company and convinced you have the best thing and if only you could get visibility in front of your CTO—then an internal hackathon is a great way of enticing the internal developers to skip to the top of the list, get an exclusive peak of data or even incubation,” says Delyn Simmons from Mashery.

People can get all fired-up when they realize they aren’t going to be putting the company at risk by implementing avant-garde ideas in their everyday projects. At an internal hackathon, employees are encouraged to come up with actionable solutions. Give them a carte blanche.

Like Sabeen Ali, founder of AngelHack, says, “They (employees) get to lower their typical boundaries, typical restriction, and build something that they think isn’t part of their immediate role or immediate responsibility. There’s a freedom to it.”

It is a chance for you to tap into potential talent without having to spend time and money looking for skills outside the organization. Say goodbye to a pile of résumés, and say hello to some vacation days.

Get your company to adopt it as a business practice.

Wipro held an internal hackathon for its employees in June 2014.

Wipro CEO T K Kurien said, “We intend to do one hackathon every month. You realize people’s competency once you go through a hackathon. You find that competency sometimes doesn’t reside at the top of the pyramid; it lies right at the bottom.”

Be ready for unprecedented employee engagement

You want engaged employees, people who are passionate about their work and enjoy a sense of belonging in the company. Engaged employees believe in innovation and helping the organization go forward. The not-so-engaged employees will go through motions, but they won’t do much more. The actively disengaged employees undermine team accomplishments, showing their unhappiness every chance they get. Gallup says that businesses in the U.S. lose $350 billion every year because of disengaged employees!

HR managers can unleash the phenomenal power of engaged workers by ensuring employee commitment, making them go the extra mile for the company only because they want to. They can use hackathons as tools to bring about meaningful change. Through hackathons, HR leaders drive engagement by focusing on self-directed and dynamic learning, a diverse and flexible work environment, encouraging empowered teams and transparency and honesty by the management, facilitating talent mobility, and ensuring a culture of recognition.

Using tools such as hackathons, HR can help build camaraderie and cohesiveness. Along with getting rid of organizational silos and fostering innovation, such hackathons set the scene for employee recognition and other employee-focused initiatives such as enhancing employee engagement for better productivity and overall profitability.

Pi Wen Looi, the president of Novacrea, a California-based business management consulting firm, and the head judge of “Hack the Experience,”said, “Employee engagement is a complex problem. There’s more than one thing that feeds into whether or not a person is engaged. A hackathon like this gets a lot of people thinking about the problem in different ways. You’re kind of attacking it from different angles.”

Companies such as LinkedIn and Facebook are also using hackathons to tackle low levels of employee engagement. In the LinkedIn HR hackathons, “interns with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and disciplines” from the Silicon Valley compete to come up with innovative solutions to help HR execute its priorities successfully.

So, what’s stopping you from doing one for your company? Disrupt HR!

You could take a leaf out of CISCO’s notebook and reconfigure the HR function.

Build innovative tangible products

In the hackathon lingo, the word innovation is perhaps the most hackneyed. But there really isn’t another term that quite crystallizes what these events embody. Here are a few examples of what the coming together of enthusiastic minds can achieve. Products may not be fully fleshed out but the promise they hold is immense.

At HackerEarth internal hackathons have become de rigeur to break everyday monotony and unlock excellence. Held every quarter, the company had 10 so far. Five ideas shortlisted from every hackathon go into production. Over 50 products have been rolled out, either to customers or internal teams. Code Monk, Wordsworth, Flash, and Optimus. No, they aren’t names of Transformers! These are some of the wildly successful products HackerEarth’s teams created at internal hackathons. Code Monk is an app for learning programming on the go; it’s been downloaded 88,000 times in six months. Wordsworth is an internal grammar and guideline checking tool. Flash is a caching system that decreases the page load time, thereby enhancing customer experience and improving page ranking. BlackOps is an in-house mail engine which saves more than $3500 per annum, and Optimus is a bot which monitors, reports, and resolves issues in the infrastructure saving us countless man hours. What you need to know is that none of these tools were a part of the plan or roadmap. They wouldn’t have come about without internal hackathons.

Madhusudhan Anand, Engineering Manager at HackerEarth, said, “The coming together of teams boosts morale when everyone ideates together to solve a problem and having fun while doing so greatly improves engagement. Then the camaraderie that comes from people working across different parts of the organization has always been a great way to strengthen communication and foster a sense of collaboration, community, and innovation that comes with being a part of the HackerEarth Family.”

Watch your company culture get upvoted

As an HR manager, if you can’t come up with ideas to boost the sagging spirits, why not ask the employees to identify ways to address the pain points? At Big Spaceship, the overnight hackathon Hack the Spaceship was about finding creative ways to improve company culture.

You can teach the employees what the company is about.

One of the best examples of reinforcing company values through internal hackathons is by doing what Atlassian, a Sydney-based enterprise software company, does. The employees wait for the ShipIt days. The challenge embodies the company’s values: be the change you seek, play as a team, and build with heart and balance. People don’t take them too seriously or get too competitive. They have 24 hours of fun, enjoying fantastic interdepartmental collaboration, and reaping rewards of many kinds.

You only need look at what Facebook’s hackathons did for its culture.

In Pedram Keyani’s words: Hackathons organically encourage culture-building and collaboration within the company without any top-down guidance. Employees, both new and old, work together quickly and efficiently, improvising and brainstorming, failing and winning, and achieving new levels of interpersonal harmony.

At hackathons, employees are likely to make a couple of lasting friendships, and they come to depend on each other in positive ways. The chances these employees will recommend the company to people outside are quite high.

Talent retention becomes easier; disgruntled employees become fewer.

Hiring becomes the easiest part of the job

If you are talking external hackathons, then HR managers responsible for recruitment already know what this is about.

Finding game changers within the organization could happen with internal hackathons. But if it doesn’t, then you need to look elsewhere. As an HR manager, you can get the management to host or attend hackathons to capture the right talent.

Community building and entrepreneurship are not the only focus areas of hackathons now. They are routinely used to recruit people with the right skills and attitudes.

HR can network with the organizers to get access to interesting profiles. When you attend events, building rapport can’t hurt. Understand what the hackathons are about, and find out why the participants are attending them.

Scout for tech talent at relevant hackathons, and you’ll meet your target before you know it.

Don’t wait for the flip side. There isn’t one.

People love to hate HR, but you don’t need to give them reasons.

HR doesn’t have to be the bearer of bad tidings always. And there are enough hours in a workday to get everything done.

You can do more than “slapping bandages on problems.”

Getting people strategies and business needs to be looking at the same end goals requires more than a little nudge in the right direction.

Whether you are tasked with protecting company culture, getting the brightest minds, retaining talent, or upping employee engagement rates this quarter, there’s help.

You just need to look in the right places.

Looking to conduct online coding tests to hire developers for your organization? Try HackerEarth Recruit free for 14 days to start creating tests for your candidates right away.

We believe hackathons are changing the world. Hackathons are all about innovation. Hackathons provide an excellent way for hackers to learn, innovate, and create something unique.

MLH is a community-driven organization which aims to empower hackers. MLH has powered over 200 weekend-long innovation competitions for a community of 65,000+ students. MLH and HackerEarth share a common passion—helping hackers across the globe to learn and innovate.

Today, we are thrilled to announce HackerEarth Sprint’s new integration with MLH, which will make it very simple for organizers to host MLH hackathons on HackerEarth Sprint.

Sachin Gupta, CEO and Co-founder of HackerEarth, said, "We strongly believe in MLH's mission and are excited to be working together to provide a great experience to both organizers and participants."

With a single setting in Sprint, the following are taken care of:

• Login with MyMLH: Login with MyMLH allows users to login/signup through MyMLH. This will automatically fetch the participant details and display them on the dashboard.
• MLH Special Prizes: All the special prizes from MLH are automatically added to your hackathon’s special prizes.
• MLH Badge: The MLH badge will be placed on your hackathon cover image.
• MLH Hardware devices: The participants are informed about the hardware devices made available to them by MLH, and they can easily tag their submissions with the devices they have used.

We will continue working with MLH to improve the experience for both hackathon organizers and participants.

Jon Gottfried, Co-Founder of MLH, said, "We are very excited to work with HackerEarth to standardize the MLH experience for hackers and organizers across the platforms that they use to run their Member Events."

To learn more about Major League Hacking, check out https://mlh.io/

About Major League Hacking

Major League Hacking (MLH) is the official student hackathon league. Each year, MLH powers over 200 weekend-long invention competitions that inspire innovation, cultivate communities and teach computer science skills to more than 65,000 students around the world. MLH is an engaged and passionate maker community, consisting of the next generation of technology leaders and entrepreneurs.

The Problems

The Solutions:

The Code

Explanation

Homework

Challenge

What are Challenge problems?

How do we solve this:

Watch this brilliant video by MIT professor Patrick Wilson, who solves a problem (at 42:30) and amazing trick he puts into it

To summarize the procedure for the problem discussed by the professor, here are the steps -

1. Definition
   Does the problem reduce to Knapsack? Subset sum? Something else?
2. Representation
   Should the main data structure be an array, a list or a tree?
3. Approach
   Dynamic Programming? Graph Algorithm? etc...
4. Algorithm
   DFS / Sorting / Edit Distance --> Simulated Annealing / Genetic Algorithm
5. Experiment

The time required to solve them

1. Do not jump into meta-heuristics (Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing) without creating a strong base solution.
2. When optimizing, try to keep the code clean for later.
3. Your nested loops need the most attention because that’s where you get the maximum gains.
4. Greed is good. Keep your heuristics simple and easy to change.
5. If some idea feels too complicated, it is. Save it for the next contest, after reading a little more and being confident about it.

Do you know SixDegrees.com was the first social network site which allowed the user to create a profile and connect?

In a world of 7 billion people, it seems hard to believe that the Six Degrees of Separation theory contends that we are all connected to each other by six or fewer acquaintances.

For example, there are, at most, six people standing between you and Tom Cruise or President Obama (or Trump if you lean that way).

Going by the numbers, the idea looks pretty plausible.

Assume that you know 50 people or have 50 friends and these 50 friends of yours know 50 others who are not your friends, and so on.

The math says that in 6 steps you would be connected with 50⁶, or 15.62 billion people.

Six Degrees of Separation Theory

In 1929, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy published a volume of short stories named Everything is Different.

In one of his stories titled Chains, he said that with growing communication and travel, the friendship network would grow irrespective of the distance between two humans.

And with a growing social network, the social distance would shrink immensely.

All the people on the planet could be connected to one another by 5 or fewer people.

This theory captivated millions of mathematicians, sociologists, and physicists and also laid the founding stone of the first online social network.

Soon several “small world” projects were conducted.

The small world experiment comprised experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram, examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States.

These experiments suggested that humans are connected to each other through a network, connected to each other by the shortest path.

In 2005, Samy Kamkar wrote a small piece of code for his myspace account.

Whenever anyone visited Samy’s profile, it copied his picture and tag line on his home page saying “Samy is my hero” and also copied the code.

Within 20 hours, this code was on more than 1 million myspace user profiles. It is considered one of the fastest growing web viruses of all time.

Though mostly harmless, Samy was caught by the United States Secret Service and was prohibited from using the Internet for three years.

The point I am trying to make is that within a span of few hours, a simple XSS webworm was shared among more than 1 million users, proving that the world was getting smaller and further studies and research on small world projects need to be escalated.

The real breakthrough came with the college game of “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” where college students linked other Hollywood co-stars to Kevin Bacon in six or fewer steps.

The huge volume of data collected in the game gave scientists and researchers immense information to process and proceed and gave them opportunities to prove the concept of six degrees of separation.

In 2011, Facebook and researchers at Cornell computed that the average separation across 721 million people using Facebook was only 3.74.

In their latest research published in February 2016, this number dropped down to 3.57, with more than 1.59 billion people active on Facebook.

On average, Facebook users are connected by an average of 2.9 to 4.2 degrees of separation. The image shows the average of each person.

Six Degrees of Separation Theory meaning analysis

Suppose you assign an integer called Hash to each friend in a group (Read more about Hash Function here).

Approximately half of your friends will have even numbers or even hash, whose binary representation would be 0.

A quarter of them would have the number divisible by 4, giving the binary representation as 00. This means ½ⁿ people will have their hash or numbers ending with n zeros.

To track, you find the number with the maximum number of zeros. If there are n zeros, you can find C*2ⁿ unique numbers.

To calculate the average, you find the number with the maximum number of zeroes.

Use Bitwise OR operation on these numbers and then recursively do it for one set of friends, and then friends-of-friends, and their friends and so on to find the shortest path.

The result is amazing! It is just unbelievable how small the world is.

With a growing social network, the average separation and connection would soon reduce to possibly 2 to 3 degrees of separation.

And someday, a mail from The Prince of Somalia telling you that you have won the lottery might be actually true!

Till then, connect with best developers across the planet using first degree connections by building your profile on HackerEarth and participating in various programming challenges.