Nitecans All Prove to be Winners on Hack DAY 2017!

It was the largest internal event of the year. An incredible 80 Nitecans divided into 11 teams to battle it out on Hack DAY, which took place on Saturday 9 September at the Niteco offices in Hanoi and HCMC.

A unique opportunity to show off coding skills, creativity and innovation, Hack DAY participants worked for an intense eight hours to produce a product worthy of a US$1000 first prize reward!

The event, which was aptly themed ’Passion Never Fails,’ saw Nitecans bring forward ideas that addressed various problems, from an add-on that helps manage timesheets better to the creation of an entirely new programming language.

Niteco’s PMO Manager, Petra Sintorn acted as one of four judges on the day. She said, “It was a great day of collaboration and ingenuity. I was really impressed by the standard of work produced by our teams, who exemplified the phenomenal expertise that exist among our staff. This is what makes Niteco a great place to work; our people are an exceptional group, brimming with fantastic ideas and passion.”

As part of the rules, each team had at least one junior staff member, giving them the opportunity to work and learn alongside senior developers.

Despite frantic worries among some teams about whether or not they would finish within the eight-hour time limit, every team managed to deliver their demos along with well displayed presentations.

Commenting on the overall experience, Program Manager, Tung Nguyen said, “We managed to only finish one third of the project during the morning and had to work really hard in the afternoon to get the demo done on time. But the race against time was thrilling and we were very happy to finally pull it off. I am looking forward to the next event, at which I think we can definitely do better.”

The final results were:

• First place: FH team with their face recognition application that can automatically capture and detect different types of faces. Their product can be used in a restaurant to help identify previous customers, simply based on their faces and provide additional information regarding their buying/service using habits.
• Second place: Design++ Team with a Chrome extension to show intranet information and notifications on Chrome’s default page. It will enhance intranet usage internally and help people keep track of internal activities better.
• Third place: Nguyen Team with an Email Assistant application that’s capable of auto-generating suitable content for users. It greatly reduces the time users have to spend on categorizing and replying emails that have similar content.