Interview with Adolfo Sanz de Diego, Hackathon Lovers

Hackathon Lovers is a community of hackathon lovers that holds regular events with a focus on solving technical problems in an innovative way.

In this interview they tell us about the advantages of this format and the challenge of going from face-to-face to online format.

Full interview:

1. Can you briefly explain what Hackathon Lovers is?

Hackathon Lovers is a technology company that organizes its own hackathons and helps other companies organize their own as long as they comply with non-abusive conditions for the participants that we have included in our ethical code (https://hackathonlovers.com/#principios).

2. What are the advantages of hackathons compared to other types of events?

Perhaps the biggest advantage is that with the solutions that are developed we can help solve real problems.

More bonds are created between the participants than in other events since you are working with them side by side for a couple of days without stopping and above all you learn a lot from your colleagues.

For the participants who are very juniors, they are a place where they can put into practice the knowledge they have, learn from those who already have more experience, make new contacts and, above all, who come out with projects that they can teach to find work.

3. One objective of this type of event is to address certain challenges that can be solved using public data. Would you like to highlight, by way of example, any of these and briefly comment on what kind of solutions the participants propose?

The use of public data in hackathons is quite common, since that public data can be used in conjunction with other APIs to develop better products than without that data.

For example, at #Hack4Good the map of the evolution of air pollution in Madrid was developed. At #DataFestMAD, a team developed an application that showed the optimal route between two points avoiding the pollution areas, and at #TWOC15 , the winning team developed an application that shows the reputation of places (neighborhoods) based on open data on crime, facilities and infrastructures.

The use of public data in hackathons is quite common, since that public data can be used in conjunction with other APIs to develop better products than without that data.

4. What kind of profiles come to your meetings?

This question depends on the challenge the hackathon is addressing. Normally the people who attend are from the technology sector and within this we can find profiles of web development, design, data analysis, blockchain ... Although we have also organized other types of hackathons in which people from the health sector (#Searchathon), legal (#JustiApps) and renewable energy (#Renovathon) have participated, among others because the challenge was more focused on these sectors .

5. What advice would you give to those who want to participate in a hackathon?

Let them sign up without fear. To participate in a hackathon you don't have to be a supercrack. The idea is to get together with other people with more / less level and work side by side to come up with a solution to the problem that arises, meet people from the sector or from other sectors, have a good time and learn.

6. The restrictions caused by the pandemic have been a challenge for you, how have you dealt with it?

A little because we have had to change and rethink the dynamics of a hackathon to adapt it to the online environment by using different platforms for communication during the hackathon. So we had to find which tools provided us with the functionalities we needed and at the same time that they were easy for the participants to use, and we even had to do some small development to facilitate our work.

7. What types of open data have you used in your projects and what data would you like to work with?

At the #OpenApiHackathon on Open Banking organized by Liberbank and atmira, Liberbank made available to the participants its catalog of Open Banking APIs developed following the technical guides of Directive 2015/2366 on payment services in the internal market, PSD2, standard community that obliges financial entities to share their data.

The API catalog dealt with Payments, Oauth Provider, Accounts, PSD2 Registration, and there were two work environments, a first using a Sandbox development environment and later a second step to Pro.

8. Finally, how can interested people follow Hackathon Lovers and collaborate with you?

You can follow us on twitter and join our meetup, where we have a mailing list in which we announce both the hackathons that we organize and those that we see that comply with our code of ethics.