Jamie 0:35
Hello, and welcome to the RDK podcast. I’m your host, Jamie Walker. And today we have something slightly different. You may recognise our guest from a previous episode. Please welcome back Glee Abraham. Pleasure to have you here with us again, Glee, how you doing?

Glee 0:52
I’m very Good. How are you, Jamie?

Jamie 0:53
I’m very good. So obviously today we’ve got something special for our listeners. This time, we’re here to chat about the RDK hackathon. Now, some of our guys may never have heard of a hackathon before. Can you please explain what it is and how it works?

Glee 1:13
Yeah, so a hackathon is a mechanism to drive innovation within the RDK community. So we asked the entire community to come up with fresh ideas or contributions to RDK, that solves the technological problem. And in case they have a lack of inspiration, we’ve given some topics to inspire them. So we had our bucket list or you know, our backlog. And we shared some items on backlog saying if you want to pick up this backlog, you can pick it up or if you have a better solute problem that you want to solve, you can figure it out as well. So it’s all about having different teams from across the community come together and solve a problem. And so it hopefully will drive contributions to RDK.

Jamie 2:02
That’s it now, I think, obviously, we did a hackathon back in 2020. But this one’s slightly different. Can you tell us how?

Glee 2:12
Yeah, the the concept of a hackathon was born like two or three years ago, after one of our technology summits, where were the technology summit at the technology summit, a lot of engineers, architects, people from the community come together to you know, learn RDK share knowledge, right? So the concept of the hackathon was born preliminary from Comcast and later from Nosh in Portugal, where they suggested that it would be good if the community did an activity one level deeper than the technology summit one level deeper, right.

Glee 2:49
So at the technology summit, typically we would give guided exercises to give a hands on experience in the community. But last year, what we did with a hackathon was to convert our guided exercises into a live project. And each project had a project lead and a guide. Right? So there was a guide who technologically You know, a lot of help the team members do something and there was a lead for the project who ensured that everybody worked together and did something so rd key management Actually, we had few engineers on our team lead each of the hackathon topic. So it was like, like a guided exercise where we decided what the problems were we any, all the team members could join in for problems. And it was more of a learning experience than you know, coming in, you know, doing something together. And it did solve some problems.

Glee 3:48
I’m not saying it was bad. It was like a, it wasn’t like a hybrid of the previous technology summit, where we had guided exercises, to a more hands on experience where we had kind of like a mini hackathon. We call it a mini hackathon, right? It was not a real hackathon, it was a mini hackathon. But this time is different that it’s the real hackathon, where we’re taking the hands off. We’re not doing anything on this hackathon. It’s just the teams for themselves. They’re on their own. They have the problem, they solve it, and they give it to us for judgement. We have judges this year, very different from last year. And we will have a winner. Right? So that’s the motivation for the teams to do well and contribute back. So that’s kind of like the difference between last year and this year.

Jamie 4:28
That’s it, so as you mentioned the mini hackathons had a slightly different aim to this year’s hackathon. But from your perspective, why hold a hackathon.?

Glee 4:39
The reason is because we want the community to come toRDK is something that you know, you don’t have time to do in your regular project work. It’s I know we all know that there are gaps and things that we need to keep calm. In the addressing throughout the revelation of RDK, but we don’t have time for it, we pick up topics like that. And we converted into a hackathon, hopefully hoping to drive contributions that fixes the problems, right? Are brings a new feature into article, right?

Glee 5:16
So hackathon has that purpose. But more than that, it is about inspiring the community to come together and do some cool stuff and get recognised for it, right, you’re going to the winner of the hackathon is going to present it at the Arctic technology summit this year. So it’s a matter of pride as well, to make yourself known within the community to show the community what your team is doing, right, what your team is capable of doing. So it’s more like a, you know, a community inspiration.

Jamie 5:50
Glee, it ll sounds fantastic. And what a great way to highlight key talent and provoke new ideas. How has it been perceived this year?

Glee 6:01
So this is the first time that we are ever running a full hackathon. Last year, we had success with what we did last year at mini hackathon. So we were very, you know, you know, we don’t know how the community would receive this. And we were apprehensive to a certain extent, but the response has been overwhelming. We have more than 138 individuals that have registered to spanning across 38 different teams. And apart from the nine topics that we provided, we got four new topics. So we have a total of 13 topics that is getting solved on the hackathon. And I think we have more than 20 companies participating in the hackathon engineering wise, right? So I think it has been an overwhelming response this year, we did not expect this. And we are looking forward to the results as well.

Jamie 6:47
Yeah, so amI and I think that’s incredible. And I think I guess all the guys are working hard to achieve that winner spot as well. Right? Yeah. When can we expect that winner to be announced?

Glee 6:58
So the winner is going to be announced in October, and in November, the winner will get to present at the rdk technology summit.

Jamie 7:08
Perfect. So in front of everybody and all the events – that’s super exciting. Well, Glee, thank you so much for joining us again today to talk about such an incredible event.