JakeYallop / minihack

What is This?

MiniHack is a monthly meetup where teams compete to produce the best solution to a pointless problem.

What do you mean by 'The Best'?

Each month there will be a guest judge. 'The Best' is whatever that person deems is the best!

Who Can Join, and How Are the Teams Made?

Anyone can join.

Anyone - even if you've never written a line of code in your life. In fact, that's part of the point of this.

When you sign up, you'll be asked for your experience level and prefered language. We'll try to form teams with a broad range of experience.
The idea is to match very experienced people with people that have less. We also try to keep the teams as small as possible: 3 - 4 people.

You'll also be asked whether you're okay to be the spokesperson for your team - that is, the person that demonstrates what's been produced at the end.

The teams will be decided before the event.

Can I Work in the Technology That I Know Best?

Yes, and maybe no.

We'll ask when you sign up which tech you'd like to work with (if any). If you fill that in, we'll try and match you with other people that say the same. Obviously, if you say that you only want to code in Ook, there's a possibility that we won't be able to find a match.

I'm a Busy Person - How Long Will This Take

It's a mini-hackathon, so we'll try and keep the whole thing to under two hours - that's:

10 minute intro 1 hour 30 minutes coding 10 minutes judging 10 minutes to announce the winners

Will I Win Anything If I / My Team Wins?

Yes - we have sponsors! The winning team gets Just Eat vouchers (each)!

We also have an opt-in league table running for 6 months. At the end, the winner gets a prize, including vouchers and a t-shirt.

What Kind of Problems Will There Be?

We'll try to keep it different each time. We'll also try to make it broad enough that you can use whatever tech you think fits the bill; some examples (these will be replaced by actual examples when we have some):

• A spreadsheet that, when zoomed out, displays an image
• An audio message hidden in text
• A route finder that avoids certain points on a map

What Happens to the Code That Gets Produced?

It goes in here.

What if we Don't Finish?

Doesn't matter! It's all for fun - so if you learn something, have a laugh, and have a talk to other people, it's a successful event.

Are There any Rules?

Yes: be excellent to each other!
Any discrimination or abuse will get you removed from the event.

Pre-Requisites

The following would be useful:

A code editor, for example VS Code.

A git client, for example git bash.