 "What went down at Bangalore’s first bot hackathon")
It’s Saturday afternoon. As a hundred odd engineers in teams of two or three clack away at their keyboards in the TLabs’ offices in Bangalore, one of them leans back in his chair for a moment, taking a break. He clicks his pen noisily over and over, then looks up and locks eyes with someone across the room.
“Is this annoying you?” he calls out, waving the pen. He squints at his friend’s mumbled response and shakes his head. “Are you sure?” he asks, then continues with his tick. Around him, the occasional barefoot engineer lounges on a beanbag, alternatively typing up code and sipping chai. It’s hard to tell what time it is – all the windows have been covered, but a little bit of sunlight peeks through, meaning it’s not yet night.
This isn’t a normal hackathon. These developers have specifically signed up to build bots in what event partners TLabs, conversational commerce startup Haptik, and talent discovery platform Venturesity have dubbed a “botathon.”
Someone once described a hackathon as doing homework the night before it was due, but with fire. The TLabs office was decidedly cool – the event had started at 8 am, but the bot building hadn’t truly begun until three hours later, with hackers trickling in into the afternoon (“It’s a Saturday morning. I sleep a lot on Saturday,” an engineer told me).
Though chill on the outside, urgency hung in the air, best showcased by the pen-clicker. Plenty would happen under the surface of the between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon, when 10 of the best teams would present their bots for a chance to win $225, $450, and $890 respectively, along with FbStart memberships that include free Facebook and Amazon Web Services cloud credits.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here
