6 – 7 July 2013 have been some great weekend.

It actually initiated 2 weeks back when I learned about the Code Challenge organized by Ebène Accelerator. I was very much interested to participate. I went to work and built up a team with colleagues. Avinash joined in first, Natasha followed and then Nitin Bachraz joined the crew. We were set to start things. I registered the team as ‘Geckos’ (does openSUSE click here, yes) and chose our motto as “we build on open source” which was true. We chose our development platform as Android, language as HTML5 and we developed on openSUSE.

We decided to meet on Saturday 29 June and synchronize our laptops with all necessary tools. We’re not professional coders by the way but geeks who mess a lot with a lot of things. Well … That Saturday we were not very lucky and could not finish things as they should. Nevertheless we spent some nice time which ended with dinner at Shoprite and some good wine.

The following week I was on-call (meaning I worked from home) and we could not meet again to discuss things. Yet we had some brainstorming sessions on facebook.

Then came Saturday 6 July 2013. Mom was so worried about my health lately she accompanied me to help in carrying my gadgets (three laptops, one tablet and two mobile phones). Yes, I needed all of them … it would be the gecko at work. I reached Orange Tower around 08h00 and Avinash came to fetch some of the luggages (oh gadgets I mean).

Bachraz informed he’ll be late. We entered the building, collected the registration form and filled. The next moment we got our Code Challenge badges and T-Shirts. The feeling of being part of the hackathon was great.

We had a nice breakfast with some snacks and the event was initiated by Hon. Minister of Finance and Economic Development Xavier Luc Duval.

We got to our seats and opened the Code Challenge envelope. The topic on which to develop was “land based mobile application”. We did some brainstorming in the team and scribbled ideas on paper. It didn’t take long to start typing codes … Yes by the way we were not designing the UI but coding it. Haha!

We were enjoying. Food was great, music was awesome and the atmosphere was just right but we did not stay for the night. We went home and came back the next morning around 09h00. Many looked tensed. It was normal probably since there was a presentation ahead and jury would give their verdict. Geckos were not stressed (: Geckos were having fun. In fact from time to time Avinash pinged me to appear stressed since it was not looking natural.

It was time for the presentation and we did what we had to do, héhé! Our presentation lasted 7 mins and after 2 hours or so the result was:

Big thanks to the Ministry of Finance for initiating this project, Ebène Accelerator for organizing the same and sponsors for supporting.