BE-terna participated at Dragonhack Hackathon

Dragonhack is Slovenia’s longest running and largest student hackathon. It’s a great opportunity to network, meet like-minded people, get to know several companies and their people, as well as being an ideal opportunity for participants to show off their coding skills and present themselves to the sponsors. 

This year was the biggest to date and also the first online Dragonhack. It was held over a fun-packed weekend on the 7th and 8th of November.  Communication was done via the Discord platform and presentations of the projects were reviewed on the Devpost platform.

The hackathon started with an opening ceremony hosted by renowned Slovenian comedian Pižama, and featured a presentation of the sponsors. Later, teams of students, mentors and lecturers worked for 24 hours straight and finished their projects at noon the next day.

The BE-terna team also participated as mentors and judges of the hackers.  Rok held a very educational and interesting workshop about Microsoft Azure, an application that some teams used for their hacks.  Boža had the role of a machine-learning or AI “guru” as she challenged the teams and their captains participating in the ‘Best Prediction Hack’ category.  Honourable mentions also go to Aleš and Nac who did a great job of lifting spirits and entertaining the participants.

We were very pleased to see so many participants interested in the ‘Best Prediction Hack’ category. There were 17 categories, and more than a third of the participants entered their hack to compete for our prize. Our job as  judges wasn’t easy because there were numerous intriguing ideas. Therefore, we decided to dig deep into the code and also took into consideration which tools the teams used to build the hack, as well as the business aspects and usefulness the hack. 

Our winner was the Orbeez team with a hack called Swirly, an amazing NLP algorithm that adapts to a  company's needs and serves new & existing employees with quick responses to questions. It does a pretty good job at interpreting natural language and providing the right answer to each question. 

Unfortunately, due to the current pandemic restrictions, we couldn’t throw a party to celebrate the end of the hackathon. Nevertheless, we are looking forward to meeting the participants in the future, when all our lives go back to normal. 
We would also like to use this opportunity to give kudos to the organisers for putting on a great event. It was a nice experience and we hope to participate again next year.