The five-member Melbourne team taking part in a hackathon in Kuala Lumpur today says they do it mostly for the fun of it.
The five come from differing corporate backgrounds but were acquainted with each other during their student days.
The five are: Reuben Bond, a distributed systems engineer who works as a contractor for Microsoft;
Someet Ekbote, who is in the same line, but works for Channel Seven;
{loadposition sam08}Artem Nikolayevsky, an engineer, who works for Unlockd;
Aaron Bond, the brother of Reuben, who is an Android developer working for Unlockd; and
Albel de Rais, who is an UX/UI designer working for ANZ.
The Australian team: (from left) Reuben Bond, Someet Ekbote, Albel de Rais, Aaron Bond and Artem Nikolayevsky.
Reuben said that he liked taking part in hackathons because it gave him a chance to work outside corporate strictures and experiment with his own ideas.
Further, he said, the code he was working with was now open source and that made it so much better.
The five have worked together on a number of hackathons before, such as the Microsoft More Computing, Telstra Cloud, Melbourne datathon and Victoria GovHack.
Ekbote said he enjoyed working with the other four and they would knock ideas back and forth before deciding on what they would create.
They said they hoped to end the competition with a win but even if they did not, it would be good fun. Coding began at 2pm and will run through the night.
The teams taking part are:
- Dapper Labs Australia
- Nomads Hong Kong
- Codeminators India
- A-team India
- Unhandled Exceptions! India
- BinAIRy India
- neutron star collision Indonesia
- Airkathon Malaysia
- AirStrike Malaysia
- Revolegend Malaysia
- PENTASQUAD Malaysia
- i-SENI Malaysia
- Swoosh Swoosh Philippines
- Algorithm Philippines
- Aviato Singapore
- Raven Singapore
- AIRBORNE South Korea
- Helayo Sri Lanka
- Titans Sri Lanka
- Routster Thailand
There are 13 nationalities with the following breakdown:
- 23 Malaysian
- 22 India
- 13 Philippines
- 10 Sri Lanka
- 6 Indonesia
- 5 China
- 5 Thailand
- 5 Singapore
- 4 Australia
- 3 US
- 2 South Korea
- 1 Egypt
- 1 Kazakhstan
The participants are 15% female and the balance male, while the average age is 24 to 25 years, with the youngest being 20 and the oldest 30.
The writer is attending the hackathon as a guest of AirAsia.