Darren Maher

This week I was given the opportunity to participate in my first ever hackathon.

As far as hackathons go, I think my expectations may now be set unexpectedly high.

Thanks to Project Europe me and three fellow patchers were flown out to Warsaw, to work in a room of 100 other highly ambitious builders.

There was definitely a unique kind of energy in the building, when you first walked in, almost like a start-up hub on crack; there was next to no warm up or settling in period, just straight into building.

And build we did. Over the 20 hours, me and my teammates built Aran Labs, an AI personal assistant which draws on various data sources, such as E-Mails, Calendar, and certain preferences, to provide suggestions of news stories you may be interested in, films you might like, or sports scores you cared about.

The idea was for the assistant to learn enough about you to be your own hyper personalised presidential briefing, every morning. All powered by ElevenLabs voice generation.

In the end we managed to pull together a pretty good prototype for 20 hours, including all the main features we had set out to build.

A couple of key takeaways from my first (and certainly not last) hackathon:

-Organisation and accountability in a team build is essential, naturally if two people are working on the same feature, or someone isn't pulling there weight, progress can stagnate very quickly.

-Europe is kind of cracked. Everyone loves to say you can't build in Europe, and while the infrastructure and regulation may be lagging slightly, there is no lack of talent, and no lack of support for that talent, Project Europe being a brilliant example.

-Staying up for 20 hours straight, being locked in to building something, is extremely fun.

Huge thank you to Kitty, Jade, the whole Project Europe team, ElevenLabs, and all the other sponsors for organising such a great event.

If I don't see Santa Claus serving hot chocolates at my next hackathon I will be sorely dissapointed.

-Darren