i’ve been working as a software engineer for about two years now and although i’m relatively new to the field, i’ve learned a lot about how we build software for production use. since i work at a software consultancy, we often don’t have the opportunity to see a project all the way through from beginning to end. typically we are thrown in at some random point and told to complete a part of a project or give clients proof of concepts....
bogged down by your day job? feeling like the more you work, the less fun coding gets? perhaps you’re a student and you’re overwhelmed by learning how to code realistic applications? maybe your weekends are simply uneventful. one possible solution is attending and competing at a hackathon. recently myself and some of my friends (who are current and former co-workers) on a whim competed at a hackathon called NASA Space Apps, six of us made a semi decent full stack web app where we would track NASA satellites and displayed what they saw in human readable formats, throughout those 48 hours we all collectively came to learn a couple of things about going to hackathons that i’d like to share....
if you have ever developed in Android and had the misfortune of being assigned to an ATAK plugin and thought “what the f$%& am i looking at…” well you’re in great company! ATAK is possibly the strangest, least documented, lamest “framework” that i have had the displeasure of working with. that being said, i’ve been on ATAK plugin projects for almost all of this calendar year and have picked up some useful pieces of information that aren’t documented anywhere on the internet except for in atak’s discord community....