Hacker Olympics 2014

I must admit, 'hacker' events aren't really something I frequent. They're a nice idea in theory and I'm sure they're the best thing since the light sabre bread knife for some nerds, but they're not my scene. My weekends are the time I get out and about, so I'd rather not do what I do every week day for my weekend too.

But something about the Hacker Olympics stood out to me. Instead of spending 10 hours on one throw-away project, you're spending 4 hours in a team on 22. Plus there's stuff for all levels to do for the fair-weather nerds like myself, to the bedroom Allange.

Challenges were kept secret until the very last minute. People assembled into teams (I had landed the wonderful team of Steve, Sean and a couple of chaps I hadn't met before Alax and Jairo) and opened their envelopes to find a set of challenges for keyboard and non-keyboard warriors alike.

Quite a few of them were way out of my league (what the hell is the bitcoin block chain, anyways? Hopefully one day I'll see this and laugh at either my inadequacies or the fact people took Bitcoin remotely seriously back in 2014) but give me four keyboard keys and plenty of time and I'll get you to 100m on QWOP or identify songs as code.

By far the strangest quest however was to find a coffee shop in Shoreditch (that's not the hard part...) and get them to make you a cup of Nescafe. And we did after a bit of a mad dash through the rain. Even if we possible did break their fancy coffee machine in the process...

But after all that craziness and a mad dash to try and learn Twilio in 20 minutes, we came 8th. 8th out of 20ish, I might add. Would've come nowhere without my 1337 QWOP skillz. But hey, credit to the team sat opposite us who came a neat 0th Place. They fought well.

I'm not really sure what I actually expected from the Hacker Olympics. But what I saw was some great teamwork, some greater code, and the greatest cup tower I'm ever going to get to destroy.