This weekend we were part of the world's biggest BlockChain and AI Hackathon in Groningen (NL): Odyssey.org. Writing maintainable code was an integral part of the jury process. It might seem strange but even at a Hackathon code quality matters! One participant said "Even at a hackathon you can create technical debt that slows you down".
100 teams were invited to work in GitHub private teams and created 140 (private) code repositories. Code quality was analysed for every push to every repo starting at day zero. A whooping number of 7391 automated analyses where done with static code analyser BetterCodeHub (BCH). BCH scores code quality against 10 software quality guidelines with benchmarked thresholds. Almost 25% of the repos scored a 10 out of 10 on the final day. Well done! The 10 guidelines are exlained here
Graph 1: Throughout the 3 days of hacking, the proportion of teams that complied with 10 out of 10 code quality guidelines increased from about 10% initially to about 25% on the last day
For a list of all the individual scores please visit this Hackathon scoreboard.
The teams that scored a 10/10 were invited for a technical interview with 4 consultants of the Software Improvement Group. In these 'Grill sessions' the techleads were challenged on software engineering topics like why use Blockchain, how scalable is this architecture and how strong is your security. The price was golden.
Picture 1: Odyssey team is having a relaxing chat after earning a golden star in their Grill Session with SIG
- this org with private repos was sponsored for 1 month by Github
Overall we were impressed by the technical quality of the tech leads during the grill sessions, and also by the quality of the pitches. It was great to be part of the hackathon vibe again. Looking forward to the future.
Thanks.
Jan, Hugo, Bugra, Jade, Hugo, Reinier and Michiel