Thursday 28-11-2019 - 16:25

On 23-24 November 2019, DurHack, a hackathon run by Durham University Computing Society, returned with its fourth edition, DurHack 2019, bringing together 207 students for a weekend-long programming marathon all about learning, collaboration, and innovation. During the two-day event, 46 teams participated in challenges pitched by sponsors, and also competed with Hack Western, a Canadian hackathon taking place at the same weekend, in a game of Battleship.

Taking a deeper look into the event’s history, DurHack’s origins traced back to January 2017, the year the first DurHack was organised by their founder Sara Chen after she got inspired to bring the hackathon culture to Durham University. Now, DurHack is back with its fourth iteration, and this year’s event created a name for itself by being the first EU hackathon to be part of the official Major League Hacking 2020 season launch, and also holding the record of the highest turnout of hackers in the event’s history.

DurHack 2019 is a major success story, having had 207 hackers show up (159 students from Durham and 48 from other universities across the UK and Europe), despite the original goal of having 150 students attend. The event venue was spacious enough to accommodate 207 hackers, sponsor booths, a relaxation room for hackers to rest and a chill zone consisting of four 50’’ UHD 4k TVs with Netflix, and Nintendo Switches to play Mario Kart when hackers needed a break from their projects, as well as bean bags and fairy lights!

DurHack was designed to optimise hackers’ experiences by balancing coding, networking and enjoying the fun side of being in the same environment full of people that could relate to them. To do that, DurHack ran several workshops and challenges created by their sponsors to ensure that there were plenty of other activities that participants could work on rather than their projects. One particularly enjoyable mini game that was organised to encourage hackers to take a break from their projects was Battleship with Hack Western, which turned out to be one of the most highlighted events of the night.

Hack Western, a Canadian Hackathon that collaborates with international hackathons, joined forces with DurHack 2019 to play a game of Battleship when both hackathons were 5600 km away from each other. The game lasted approximately 45 minutes and hackers from each hackathon chatted through a video call.

After a wide range of catering from Nando’s to Fat Hippo to Domino’s for midnight pizza, an incredible 46 projects were submitted. At the end of the event, hackers were awarded prizes in categories such as Changing Finance for Good (Capital One), Best Use of Google Cloud (MLH) amongst many others. The DurHack general winner prize was awarded to “Vhysio: AI Physio For The Visually Impaired”, a web app utilising a cutting edge machine learning library, tensorflow.js, to enable accessible physiotherapy for the visually impaired, by talking through exercises and responding to a user’s posture in real time. The team was awarded with Bose Sound-Link Wireless Headphones. The runner-up was Hacker the Husky, a companion for elderly people who are susceptible to dementia. The runner-up project won the Best Use of Domain.com prize from Major League Hacking, and each team member won a mechanical keyboard, kindly sponsored by The Keyboard Company.

Many more projects under the theme “Accessibility, Diversity and Inclusivity” were awarded prizes and those projects, along with every submission, can be found in the event’s Devpost page here.

DurHack will return next year with its fifth edition, DurHack 2020, aiming to be bigger, better, and more exciting than ever before! Follow DurHack on social media keep informed.

Photos of DurHack 2019 can be found at photos19.durhack.com. Thanks to the event sponsors Atom Bank, Durham County Council, Goldman Sachs, Waterstones, Capital One, StarLeaf, and many other partners for helping make this event happen.