For the second time IT professionals gathered at Voltas IT hackathon “Hack the Car”, where they had the opportunity not only to get up close and personal with the innovative car assistant but also to strengthen their relationships within the IT community and improve their organizational skills.

Still feeling the lack of such events

Hackathons are no longer a novelty in Lithuania, but IT specialists still report a lack of such events. At first glance, the main purpose of a hackathon is to develop a piece of software, but various specialists meet here to get involved in the IT community and to gain knowledge from professionals in their field. In response to that, we once again invited IT professionals to challenge themselves and show their creativity.

The participants had less than 12 hours to create a free-form prototype of a mobile app that would work in conjunction with an OBD2 device to use the data extracted from the car via the OBD2 protocol.

 “Although it was interesting to see how the teams managed to extract data from the car (find out the VIN code, how many parameters the car supports, or to read the faults), the thing that attracted the most attention were the ideas of the prototypes, their application, and presentation to the user,” – commented Gytis Kvedaravičius, Team Lead of Software Engineering at Voltas IT and one of the hackathon mentors..

Same challenge, different motivation

Three teams, including last year’s participants, competed for the first place and all were motivated by more than just the desire to compete for the best solution.

One of the teams wanted to beat last year’s results, while others came hoping to apply the challenge solution in their personal lives – simply by running diagnostics on their car and extracting relevant information from it.

The opportunity to improve organizational skills, which are particularly useful when time is limited, was also an important reason to participate in the hackathon. “The time limit helped us to be more efficient and prioritize ideas, without burning up limited resources. This allowed us to build the basis of a prototype because further improvements could already be applied and polished in the future”, said one of the teams.

Opportunities to learn from professionals

Every time a new person touches our product, it allows us to see the finer points of programming from a different angle, to get new ideas, and sometimes to discover new talents who can come up with new solutions. The hackathon is a great platform where new ideas are born and IT specialists and professionals from different fields can meet, so we intend to continue organizing events of this kind.