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What are 20 programmers able to come up with in four hours? Burda Bootcamp’s new Code Slam event, which took place last week, gave participants two surprise tasks to choose from.
“Our mission was to find Munich’s best coder, quickly”,
says Natalia Karbasova, head of Burda Bootcamp.
She and her team initiated the first Code Slam together with Allianz X, the start-up funding program by Allianz.
Ready to take risks
20 participants possessing above-average technical skills were selected out of 70 applications.
“We mainly looked at the code they had written before. And we also checked if they had taken part in hackathons, because then they are ready to take risks and can develop things quickly”,
says Patrick Müller, tech lead of Burda Bootcamp.
Code Slam versus Hackathon
The big difference between Code Slam and Hackathon is that all participants are on their own and have to submit a code that works in a very short time. The two themes to choose from, chatbots and blockchain, were only announced on the day at the last Code Slam, so that no one was able to prepare for it beforehand.
Two innovative winners
The winners impressed the jury with their ideas and the way they had implemented them technically. Babur Duisenov thrilled the audience presenting a Java-based chatbot assisting in insurance consulting. Tim Jäger received a prize for his Blockchain Implementation in Closure. Both winners were presented with an Apple Watch 2 and 200 Euros in bitcoin.
“No one can program a finished product in four hours, of course”, says Bernd Scharrer, managing director of Allianz X. “It was more important for us to see how participants approach the task and what their ideas veer toward.”
