I attended the Autistica Hackathon, organised by Deutsche Bank on the 9th and 10th of November 2016. On the 8th of November, I travelled from Leicester to London and stayed the night before in London to attend the hackathon the next day.
The hackathon aimed to develop apps for Autistic people to help them with their anxiety. As I am part of the ‘Student to Stemette’ program, I was pleased to be one of eight Student Stemettes to be selected to attend the hackathon. I was in a team of eight people and our team name was ‘Grey Beard’, the name came along because most of the members in my team were very high-up managers, and directors included the CTO of the Deutsche Bank. Initially, I thought it would be challenging to be in a team with these very experienced and high-up people but, I was very amazed to see they were very humbled and it was great to network with them.
It was 24 24-hour global hackathon, where teams participated from around the globe including St. Petersburg, Frankfurt, Bucharest, Pune, Bangalore etc. We started around noon on Wednesday the 9th Nov, with a brainstorm and soon became clearer on what we were planning to achieve. We used Amazon Web Services (AWS) and utilised the cloud-computing service to host our app. We used various AWS resources and infrastructures such as Amazon EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, Dynamo Database etc. Our app was aimed at parents, carers as well as autistic people. It records the time and location of any event that happened and provides a history, which is useful for carers to track the behaviour of the autistic person. Another feature of this app was to provide various remedies to autistic people to manage their anxiety.
The next day, around 1 p.m. the hackathon stopped and it was time for presentations. Various teams from around the world presented their ideas with great enthusiasm. I enjoyed presenting our app along with other team members and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole event. Through this hackathon, I got the wonderful opportunity to network with the graduates and other Deutsche Bank employees and found out more about the friendly and welcoming working environment at Deutsche Bank.
Overall it was a great experience, our team received a ‘Certificate of Recognition’ for outstanding performance and contribution in the hackathon. The two days were well spent and it was the time to head back to Leicester.
