HACKAJU - Aracaju's First Hackathon
September 13, 2014
On August 13th, Aracaju’s first hackathon took place: HACKAJU, hosted at Universidade Tiradentes and organized by me, Elias, and the IT programs’ coordinator, Jenifer.
Hackaju started as a dream of Elias, after taking part in a few BlackBerry hackathons he’d won. For a long time he kept saying: “I need to run a hackathon here at UNIT before I finish my degree,” always wanting to bring that experience to a university. I was always curious to take part, and after trying out BRAPPS’s hackathon together with Jenifer, we were sure people in Aracaju would love it — it had been a great professional experience.
Our idea was to run Hackaju right after UNIT’s IT Week, which featured speakers like Wesley Barbosa (Facebook) and Marcus Saad (Firefox), plus seminars and mini-courses to help participants pick a platform and land on their hackathon project idea.
We had a relaxed setup at UNIT’s Mini-Shopping, with plenty of electronic music and pizza for everyone. Over 12 hours (8am to 8pm), teams built apps, partially or fully, within the prize categories:
- Best UNIT App — R$1,500 prize
- Best App using the Twitter APIs — two Raspberry Pis
- Best e-Commerce App — incubation at SergipeTec
We had participants from companies and experienced developers, some from other states. The event was fantastic and was already being planned to repeat the following year. Special thanks to Universidade Tiradentes for the venue and cash prize, to Twitter for prizes and stickers, to SergipeTec for incubating the best e-commerce project, and to the other companies that supported us with swag and books, like Casa do Código and INFOX.
Supporters
More photos on our Facebook page or search #hackaju on social media.