The most important aspect of the whole Hackathon and in particular my collaboration with Team Tree was the social one. Here is what I mean by that.

Signing up for the Dynamo Hackathon in London, I knew that I am in for 2 days of sweet coding treat, something which I enjoy incredibly. Quick history - an old-school architect, I started coding 5 years ago and have steered my career toward it in every possible way. Having published a couple of Revit Add-ins on the Autodesk App Store, I have a bulk of experience with the Revit API. I was also fortunate enough to be exposed to the development of the Dynamo API from training organized by the Dynamo team a year back, so all in all I had a degree of confidence and mostly positive vibes coming to the event. It was going to be fun!

The other thing that made this event so special was the community around the project - working in the AEC/BIM/Revit/Computational segment in London for a couple of years now, I consider myself blessed to have access to some of the brightest and most talented people in the biz. Meeting so many cool people in the same space (shout-out to Dayle from WeWork yet again - thanks for the hosting man!) was like an awesome birthday party! The 5-men crew of DynamoUK, the folks from Autodesk and every single star from my Twitterverse contributed this event sensationally!

Since I was coming alone, the only ‘problem’ that I envisioned was the blind pick when being assigned in a team. The thing is, I’ve been an architect long enough to remember various nightmarish scenarios when working in groups and on tight deadlines. When the stakes are high and the adrenaline runs hot, we often let our giant artistic egos go rogue. This would always lead to a bad experience, hurt feelings, and poor results. I’ve had this issue so many times that I consider it the rule rather than the exception.

In the spirit of the event, I made it my secret goal to apply some Social Hacking, meaning that I was ready to enjoy the process no matter what. I did not care if my idea was the one to be executed, I wasn’t going to argue ‘my point’ if there was a better choice and winning was low on my priority list.

And maybe I was onto something, but frankly, I can’t be sure because, as it turned out, I got teamed up with 3 of the most amazing people! 10 minutes in I remember thinking ‘So .. that’s it? No arguments, no one is crying in the corner, we’re all working together .. just like that!?’ Of course, we had to make decisions and there were arguments and not everything was running smoothly all the time (I had to reinstall Dynamo and lost 2 precious hours grrr), but at the same time it’s like we had this shared goal and for the time being we were all focused on achieving it. The single most important quality was how proactive everyone was. There was no single leader yet everyone was a leader. It was an eerie experience.  

There you have it. Choosing the right topic, setting up achievable goals, creating a great presentation, writing functioning code - those were all part of the equation, but, to me, finding that team spirit from the first second was the most crucial to our victory.

So, to all future Dynamo Hackers, I wish you - good luck, have fun!