Qvault Hackathon Kickoff Jan 17th, 2022

We’re starting our first hackathon in the Qvault Discord server on January 17th at 8AM. Everyone is welcome to participate. Let’s go over the details about of event. You can RSVP for the event here.

Date and time

Our first hackathon will be a quick one! We tried to find a time that would work for most of our members, and so we cut it down to just 5 hours of hacking, so you’ll need to code fast! You’ll have from 8AM PST to 1PM PST to work on your projects. 1PM PST is the deadline to submit your code via a GitHub link in the #i-made-this channel. Please include in the Readme.md a few simple instructions to clone, install and dependencies, any run your code.

The judges will take an hour to review the projects, and we’ll meet back up at 3PM PST to announce winners and look at what everyone built. If you don’t finish in time, don’t worry! Work on it after the event, this is a great opportunity to build a project that can go on your resume.

The project – A digital instrument

Your goal is to build a digital instrument. Something like virtual piano. You can use any programming languages, tools, frameworks, or libraries that you want. The only requirement is that the user can interact with the “instrument” and sound will play through the speakers. It doesn’t need to be a piano, it just needs to make sounds.

You can, for example, build a small webpage with a virtual piano. Alternatively, you might build a command-line tool that plays the bass drum when you type drums.exe bass into the terminal, and a snare when you type drums.exe snare. If you’re more of a python person than a JavaScript dev, you could look into tools like Tkinter or QT for a graphical interface. Be creative!

You only have 5 hours, so you should get something working before you spend a lot of time polishing up the visuals, the sounds, or the bits and pieces! If you have questions or need help, everyone will be active in the Discord during the event.

Useful resources

• Python playsound
• Audio in the browser w/ JavaScript
• Python GUI with tkinter

Awards

We’ll have two categories of participants.

• Professional developers (those who have had a coding job before)
• Student developers (those who are still learning and haven’t had a job)

We’ll have 2 winners from each category. Each winner will get a free year-long subscription coupon to a Boot.dev membership, which includes full access to the community, courses and projects on the platform. The winner can use the code themselves, or if they’re already a member, share it with a friend!

In addition, 1st place in each category will get an hour of 1 on 1 time with Lane (me) the founder of Qvault to talk about whatever you want! We can work on code together, you can ask for career advice, or we can even just spend the time improving your resume.

Judging criteria

We’ll score your project using the following metrics:

• Product – how cool the application is from a user’s perspective? Does it have great features? Are there any noticeable bugs
• Technical merit – How well is the code organized and architected? Is it a clean code base?

Good luck!

I hope to see you all there! If you have any questions, just hit me up in Discord.