The Sofia University Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics (FMI) Hackathon “Code for Entertainment” brought together twenty two teams with up to six participants earlier this month. We were happy to have the opportunity to sponsor the event and contribute to its success in various ways. Lora Borisova, Senior R&D Manager was part of the jury and shares her experience.
What was your motivation to take part as a jury member in the hackathon?
As a manager I often find inspiration in collaborating with the young, talented and motivated people in my teams. I’m confident that Bulgaria has great potential for growth in the IT industry. This motivates me to support different initiatives that help the development of the young talent, in which I strongly believe. Over the years, I have participated in code camps, built courses and two company programs. Last year I stepped in as an organizer of VMware academy for talented IT students and recent graduates – Talent Boost.
What were the evaluation criteria for this hackathon?
It didn’t take me long to realize how mature and sharp the young generation of IT students is. They have outgrown the criteria we would use a few years ago. The evaluation was based on the technical implementation of the projects and the presentation skills of the teams. Overall supervision of the topic along with problem justification, innovation, architecture, and future plans were also taken into account in the final assessment. Some of them did a great job with engaging with the audience and some of them stepped even further by providing product monetization value. Meeting these more than 100 curious, sharp and motivated people was my biggest reward. This young generation of engineers is growing to become tomorrow’s leaders.
How did you choose the team that won the exclusive VMware award?
Two of our colleagues, Borislav Kavalov and Boyan Georgiev, were mentors of the teams and worked closely with them. Their insights were very helpful for choosing the winner.
“All teams came up with original ideas for this year’s theme “Code for entertainment”. They took very different approaches – the list of projects included games, social media platforms, AI-powered tools and much more. All of them showed amazing team spirit, collaboration and drive while stepping out of their comfort zone and working with technologies they had not seen before.
As mentors, we learned alongside the participants, helping them get unstuck or guiding them on how to best structure or pitch their projects. We were astonished at how fast the teams were making progress and how much they accomplished in the limited time frame of only 48 hours. The event served as an inspiration and a reminder of just how many talented young people there are in Bulgaria.” Borislav Kavalov
The team that won was called Tourists. They proposed an insightful solution of NFC usage for digitalisation of Monopoly games. Their implementation included game rules digitalisation, NFC integration, dice randomizer along with hardware implementation. They made a great demo and showed a practical approach.
