Difficultifier is “People’s Choice” at Hacked

Hacked presentations, an augmented reality remote controlled quadcopter game. Amazing.

This afternoon we had the judging and the presentations at Hacked.. After working tirelessly through the night on my solution nipping back to the hotel for a shower and a few hour’s sleep I had to get everything working for the 12 o’clock deadline. Of course I’d made one of the standard project mistakes, I’d tried to add lots of extra features without getting the core behaviours working, and so it was time for a few hours of frantic fiddling to get something working that could be shown off. At the very last minute things came together and I was in a position to put on a reasonable show.

There were lots (and I mean lots) of presentations. That we finished before midnight is a testament to the skills of the presenters and the backstage staff who kept everything ticking along rapidly. Each team had precisely ninety seconds to present, which was fortunate for me because I had precisely ninety seconds of content. The good news is that everything worked. The great news is that I managed to win “People’s Choice” award. This is voted for by those taking part at the contest and I was very, very pleased to win it.

Anyone who won a prize got to spend some time in the VIP box at Indigo while waiting to have their picture taken. Very posh. Then I had to zoom off to catch my train back to Hull and real life.

Hacked was wonderful. It must have cost a small fortune. The venue was amazing, the food was great (and free) and the organisers worked really hard to make sure that the delegates (who had not paid to attend) had a splendid time. When they hit a problem at the event (for example some issues with the WiFi) they escalated their response until everybody was sorted out.

I really, really, hope that there is another one, and I really really hope that I can go along. I’ve put some details on the project on my Difficultifier page.