I was honoured to be involved in the Worldpay #fintechhack ATDC hackathon on 10th to 12th February again this year. I was invited to join as a mentor, and we bought a load of lego, raspberry Pi, sensors and breadboards, and the Worldpay IoT Payments SDK called Worldpay Within. Here’s some more information from Forbes about how the event went. Whilst we were super-busy there was always some down time to do a variety of things. Here’s my top 10.
Top 6 things to do at the hackathon
- You could create a Lego Kanban board to keep track of open tasks.
- Programme a game of Tetris and get running on a Raspberry Pi during the hackathon.
- Maybe make a voice synthesiser on the Raspberry Pi to sing Lady Ga Ga.
- Definitely take a selfie at the ATDC sign before the hackathon gets going.
- I refactored the Worldpay Within software to reduce the development setup time from 30 minutes to 3 minutes, from 18 steps to 3.
- You could play fußball really competitively !
Hoping that they’ll be another similar hackathon event next year which we will be able to participate in again as mentors !
Overall feelings about the hackathon
Overall it was a very enjoyable weekend spent at the hackathon, helping teams with Worldpay Within was fun. Plus there weren’t too many issues which was good. My favourite team was ‘Wrist watch wallet’ – who build a wrist watch wallet out of Raspberry Pi, Worldpay Within. During the presentation they took a live payment which was brave and should be commended. I personally stayed quite late on the Saturday night to support teams that had stayed. During the night I found time to make some enhancements to Worldpay Within which was fun too.
Remember that Worldpay Within that was used at the hackathon is Open Source. If you’d like to contribute, please do so, or get in touch and let us know how we can make improvements. Alternatively, please let us know if you’ve got any additional requirements for what the software should do.
