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#SheHacks 2016

This weekend I went to #SheHacks, a hackathon for women organised by Melbourne’s very own Girl Geek Academy. I had a blast! Despite working as a developer for 10 years it’s the first hackathon I’ve been to. (Well, I attended MelHack in 2009 which was a precursor to GovHack, and I’ve also been to plenty of open source sprints, but this is my first time doing the work-in-a-group develop-a-pitch-in-48-hours thing which ‘hackathon’ evokes.)

I arrived on Friday evening with some 35 other attendees. My group and I met on Friday and we started kicking around ideas, from Instagram hashtag analysis, crowdsourced clothing fit help, emoji-based game to create a linguistic data set, to Tiara’s idea for ‘Uber for sexual health products’. This reminded one of the mentors of a similar idea for putting out a discreet call to get a tampon in an emergency. From this we thought an event focus could help the app get enough traction to benefit from the necessary ‘network effect’, and the idea for ‘eventBFF’ was born.

Saturday we spent some time discussing the user flow, potential benefits to event organisers, what kind of items would be useful to request, and sent out a user survey to ‘test the market’ and see if there was interest in the idea. We came up with the name, a logo, mockups and the bare bones of a site. (I published a demo, but no promises about how long it lives.) Throughout the weekend there was a process of generating ideas and “we could do this...” and then whittling the possibilities back down to a MVP or “that could be in future iterations”. We settled on music/camping festivals as a target for a first type of event, while conferences and fan conventions could be two others that would have quite distinct needs.

On Sunday we crammed in as much as we could, getting some 20 screens designed, an inviting front page and bare bones of a web app, finalising the market research and readying our pitch slides. By 14:30 it was ‘tools down’ and we submitted everything we had and relaxed!

A little while later was the pitches, a brutal time limit of 3 minutes to four judges from VC and business. I was blown away by how professional and complete everyone’s pitches were. Stunning graphics and compelling stories in literally every pitch. I couldn’t believe these had all been achieved in just two days. I really hope some of them live in in some fashion because I wanna use them!

Sadly eventBFF didn’t net us any 3D printed trophies, but I think we all had a great weekend. I really enjoyed the experience to collaborate in an all-female team - a real treat. The mentors were really friendly, and it’s nice to meet senior technical women in Melbourne. The attention to detail in the whole event was 💯 from delicious food, fun breaks, freebies, oh and our very own Girl Geek Academy scarves! I will be signing up for SheHacks 2017 the very day they open rego!