{"id":38950,"date":"2019-10-31T22:26:57","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T19:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/blog\/tsifrovoj-proryv-kak-eto-bylo\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T19:11:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T17:11:20","slug":"tsifrovoj-proryv-kak-eto-bylo__trashed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/en\/blog\/news\/tsifrovoj-proryv-kak-eto-bylo__trashed","title":{"rendered":"Digital Breakthrough \u2014 How It Happened","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"

This is not the first hackathon I have won, nor the first one I am writing about<\/a><\/noindex>, and this is far from the first post on Habr dedicated to the 'Digital Breakthrough'. But I couldn't help but write. I believe my experience is unique enough to share. Perhaps I am the only person at this hackathon who has won both the regional stage and the finals as part of different teams. Want to know how it happened? Welcome below the fold.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/noindex><\/p>\n

Regional Stage (Moscow, July 27-28, 2019).<\/h3>\n

<\/p>\n

I first saw the advertisement for the 'Digital Breakthrough' somewhere around March-April of this year. Naturally, I couldn't pass by such a large hackathon and registered on the website. There, I also familiarized myself with the competition terms and program. It turned out that to participate in the hackathon, one had to pass online testing, which started on May 16. And, perhaps, I would have forgotten about it, as I hadn\u2019t received a reminder email about the testing start. I must say that subsequently, ALL EMAILS from the center consistently ended up in the spam folder. Even though I pressed the 'not spam' button every time. I don't know how they managed such a result; my experience with MailGun\u2019s mailing didn\u2019t achieve the same. And it seems the guys have no idea about services like isnotspam.com at all. But we digress.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I was reminded about the start of the testing at one of the meetings of the startup club<\/a><\/noindex>, we also discussed team formation there. When I opened the test list, the first thing I did was dive into the JavaScript test. Overall, the tasks were somewhat reasonable (like, what the result would be if you add 1 + ‘1’ in the console). But from my experience, I would approach using such tests for hiring or team selection with significant reservations. The thing is, in real work, programmers rarely encounter these problems; a programmer's ability to quickly crank out code doesn\u2019t correlate at all with this knowledge, and it's quite easy to train for such things for interviews (I know this from personal experience). In general, I breezed through the test pretty quickly, checking some things in the console along the way. The Python test had similar types of tasks; I also verified my answers in the console and, to my surprise, scored more points than I did in JS, even though I have never programmed professionally in Python. Later, in conversations with participants, I heard stories about how strong programmers scored low on tests, how some people received emails stating they didn\u2019t pass the selection for the CPU, yet were still invited to it. It's clear that the creators of these tests probably hadn\u2019t heard anything about test theory<\/a><\/noindex>, nor their reliability and validity, nor how to field-test them, and the idea of tests was doomed from the start, even disregarding the main goal of the hackathon. And the main goal of the hack, as I learned later, was to set a Guinness World Record, which contradicted the tests.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At some point after passing the tests, I received a call asking if I would participate. They clarified the details and explained how to join the team selection chat. Soon, I entered the chat and briefly introduced myself. The chat was complete chaos; it felt like the organizers had brought in a lot of random people through advertisements who had no connection to IT. Numerous product managers \"of Steve Jobs level\" (a real phrase from one participant's introduction) posted stories about themselves, while real developers were nowhere to be seen. But I was lucky, and I soon joined three experienced JS programmers. We got to know each other at the hackathon, and we later added a girl to the team for inspiration and to handle organizational issues. I don't remember exactly why, but we chose the theme \"Cybersecurity Education\" and landed in the track \"Science and Education 2.\" For the first time, I found myself in a team of four strong programmers, and I experienced firsthand how easy it was to win with such a lineup. We arrived unprepared and spent until lunchtime debating whether we would create a mobile app or a web application. In any other situation, I would have thought that this was a failure. Our main challenge was to understand how we could be better than our competitors since there were numerous teams developing tests, games on cybersecurity, and similar projects. Observing this and Googling educational programs and apps, we decided that our main distinguishing feature would be emergency alert-style training. We selected a range of features that seemed interesting for implementation (registration with email verification and password checks against hacker databases, sending phishing emails (in the form of messages from well-known banks), social engineering training in the chat). Once we defined what we were going to do and realized how we could stand out, we quickly developed a fully-fledged web application, even though I took on the role of backend developer, which was unusual for me. As a result, we confidently won our track and, along with three other teams, progressed to the finals in Kazan. Later on, in Kazan, I learned that the selection for the finals was a sham; I encountered many familiar faces from teams that had not made it through. We were even interviewed by journalists from Channel 1. However, our application was shown for just one second in the report.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Digital
\nI won the regional stage with the Snowed team.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Final (Kazan, September 27 \u2013 29, 2019)<\/h3>\n

<\/p>\n

But then misfortunes began. All the programmers from the Snowed team, one by one, reported that they wouldn\u2019t be able to go to Kazan for the final, over the course of about a month. I started thinking about finding a new team. At first, I reached out in the general chat of the Russian Hack Team, and while I received a lot of responses and invitations to teams there, none of them piqued my interest. Some teams were unbalanced, like a product manager, mobile developer, and frontend developer, reminiscent of the swan, the crab, and the pike from the fable. There were also teams that didn\u2019t fit my technological requirements (for instance, those developing a mobile app on Flutter). Finally, in a chat that I considered to be a mess (the one on VKontakte where teams were being selected for the regional stage), an announcement was posted looking for a frontend developer, and I randomly replied. The guys turned out to be graduate students from Skoltech and immediately suggested meeting to get acquainted. I liked that; teams that prefer to meet face-to-face at a hackathon usually raise red flags for me due to their lack of motivation. We met at 'Grably' on Pyatnitskaya. The guys seemed capable, motivated, and self-assured about winning, so I made the decision right there. We didn\u2019t yet know what the tracks and tasks of the final would be, but we assumed we would choose something related to Machine Learning. My task would be to develop an admin panel for this, so I prepared a template based on antd-admin in advance.
\nI traveled to Kazan for free, covered by the organizers. I should mention that there was already a lot of dissatisfaction expressed in chats and blogs regarding ticket purchases and, in general, the organization of the final, and I won't recount all of that.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Upon arriving at Kazan Expo, registering (I encountered minor issues with obtaining my badge) and having breakfast, we went to choose a track. We only spent about 10 minutes at the grand opening, where officials spoke. In fact, we already had preferred tracks, but we were interested in the details. In track No. 18 (Rostelecom), for example, it turned out that a mobile application needed to be developed, although this was not mentioned in the brief description. Our main choice was between track No. 8 on Pipeline Flaw Detection, PAO Gazprom Neft, and track No. 13 on Perinatal Centers, Audit Chamber of the Russian Federation. Both required Data Science expertise, and both could integrate web components. In track No. 13, we were stopped by the fact that the Data Science task was quite weak; it involved parsing Rosstat data and it was unclear whether an admin panel was needed. Moreover, the value of the task raised doubts. In the end, we decided that as a team, we were more inclined towards track No. 8, especially since the guys already had experience solving similar tasks. We started by brainstorming the scenario in which our application would be used by the end user. We figured out that there would be two types of users: technical specialists interested in technical information and managers needing financial metrics. Once we had a clearer picture of the scenario, it became apparent what needed to be done on the front-end, what the designer should draw, and what methods were necessary on the back-end, making it possible to distribute tasks. Responsibilities in the team were divided as follows: two people were working on ML with the data acquired from tech experts, one person was writing the back-end in Python, I was developing the front-end using React and Ant Design, and the designer was working on the interfaces. We even arranged ourselves in a way that would make it easier for us to communicate while tackling our tasks.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first day went by almost unnoticed. During discussions with the tech experts, it became clear that this task had already been solved by them (\"Gazprom Neft\"), and they were simply curious to see if it could be done better. I can't say it diminished our motivation, but there was a lingering feeling. I was surprised that at night the section moderators noted the working teams (as they said, for statistics), which is usually not practiced at hackathons. By morning we had a ready front prototype, some rudimentary backend, and our first ML solution. In general, we already had something to show the experts. In the afternoon of Saturday, the designer drew noticeably more interfaces than I could have coded and switched to creating the presentation. Saturday was set aside for the record registration, and in the morning, everyone working in the hall was sent out to the corridor; then entry and exit from the hall were managed by badges, and leaving for the day was only allowed for up to an hour. I can't say this caused us any significant inconvenience; we spent most of the day working anyway. The food was indeed very sparse; for lunch, we got a cup of broth, a pie, and an apple, but again, it didn't upset us much; we were focused on something else. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

They periodically handed out red bull, two cans per person, which was very timely. The long-proven hackathon recipe of energy drink + coffee allowed us to code all night and the following day, feeling as fresh as a daisy. On the second day, we were basically just adding new features to the application, calculated financial indicators, and started showing graphs on defect statistics in the main lines. There was no formal code review in our track; experts evaluated the task solution in the style of kaggle.com, based on forecasting accuracy, while the frontend was assessed visually. Our ML solution turned out to be the most accurate, perhaps this is what allowed us to break into the lead. On the night from Saturday to Sunday, we worked until 2 AM, and then we went to sleep at the apartment we used as a base. We slept about 5 hours, and by 9 AM on Sunday we were already at Kazan Expo. I was hastily finishing up something, but most of the time was spent preparing for the pre-defense. The pre-defenses were held in two streams, in front of two teams of experts, and we were asked to present last because both teams wanted to hear us. We took this as a good sign. The application was shown from my laptop, from a running dev server; we didn't manage to properly deploy the application, but that\u2019s what everyone did.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In general, everything went well; we were pointed out moments where we could improve our application, and in the time leading up to the defense, we even tried to implement some of these suggestions. The defense also went surprisingly smoothly. After the pre-defense, we knew that we were ahead in points, we led in solution accuracy, had a good frontend, good design, and overall, we had a good feeling. Another favorable sign was that the moderator from our section took a selfie with us before entering the concert hall, and that\u2019s when I suspected she might know something))). But we didn\u2019t know our points after the defense, so the time until our team was announced from the stage was a bit tense. On stage, they handed us a cardboard with the inscription 500,000 rubles and a bag with a mug and a phone battery for each of us. We didn\u2019t get to fully enjoy our victory and celebrate properly; we had a quick dinner and took a taxi to the train.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Digital
\nThe WAICO team wins the finals.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Upon returning to Moscow, journalists from NTV interviewed us. They filmed for a whole hour on the second floor of the \"Kvartal 44\" caf\u00e9 on Polyanka, but only showed about 10 seconds in the news. Nevertheless, it was significant progress compared to the regional stage.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To summarize the overall impressions from the Digital Breakthrough event, they are as follows. A tremendous amount of money was spent on the event; I have never seen hackathons of this scale before. However, I cannot say that it was justified or that it will truly pay off. A significant part of the participants who came to Kazan were just party-goers, unable to do anything practical, and were brought in to set a record. I can't say that the competition in the finals was tougher than at the regional stage. Additionally, the value and usefulness of some tasks in certain tracks is questionable. Some challenges had already been solved at the industrial level long ago. It later turned out that some organizations leading the tracks were not even interested in their resolution. And this story is not over yet; the leading teams from each track were selected for the pre-accelerator, and it's assumed that they will result in DISRUPTIVE startups. But I'm not ready to write about this yet; we'll see what comes of it.<\/p>\n

Source: habr.com<\/a><\/p>","protected":false,"gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"html"}]},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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