Another Hackathon we prepared for after Master of Code was ING Bank’s Hackathon. But we hadn’t made any prior preparations for this hackathon, nor had we fully formed the team. In fact, we applied on the penultimate day without even knowing the deadline. And we hadn’t taken this application seriously because the team could change; Furkan and I just submitted it so we would have an application ready to go. Unlike Master of Code, Oytun, Ömer, Furkan, and I formed a team and participated in this Hackathon. Once again, I set off from Kütahya and arrived in Istanbul on a Friday morning. Actually, I was planning to come on Saturday morning, but in the meantime, I had applied to Spotify for a long-term internship. I ended up coming for its interview. While I’m at it, let me briefly talk about Spotify; I was going to start the long-term internship as a Graphic Designer. I made it to the top 3 among the applicants. To make it to the top 3, they had asked us for a sample project. Afterwards, we had the interview with Ms. Ergül, and about 3 days later, I found out I wasn’t accepted. But hopefully, after the 6-month period, I will be the long-term intern in the summer months. Hopefully, I will improve myself further and continue my preparations for the next internship period. By the way, I really appreciated that Ms. Ergül called me on the phone to tell me I wasn’t accepted. In such situations, there can be people who just send an e-mail or don’t even call at all to say you weren’t accepted. So, there was no waiting around for months wondering, “Was I accepted or not?” These are exactly the kind of people I want to work with.

Afterwards, the event was going to start around 8 PM. We met up at ITU Ayazağa with a slight delay and headed to ING Bank’s Headquarters. When we went inside, we got our badges, went downstairs, settled into our spots, and started discussing the app idea with the mentor assigned to us. After finalizing the idea, I quickly dove into the design part. As I made the designs, my friends beautifully turned them into code. And in my opinion, a very nice app emerged. By the way, the Hackathon lasted for 3 days: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. But we decided to disperse to our homes at 6 AM on Saturday to get a little rest. I was still running on my last sleep from Thursday morning. While traveling on the bus the night before, the older guys sitting in the next seat didn’t let me sleep. 😀 My time without sleep was around 40 hours. But the interesting part is, when I went home, I didn’t sleep right away; I put on an episode of anime, watched it, and then went to bed. 😀 When I woke up, I think it was around 5 PM. Since we were going to meet up again around 6 AM, I went back to bed around 1 AM, and on Sunday around 8 AM, we took our places again at the ING Bank hackathon.

With our clear minds, we all made the final touches and gave the app its final form. And because there were forty-something projects in total, we split into 2 groups again and started doing our presentations. Our presentation phase went well, too. However, we couldn’t even make it into the top 10. A project with a general concept quite similar to ours found a place in the top 3. I guess the difference between them and us was that our app was a bit more complicated compared to theirs. Anyway, whatever is best, of course. Also, as a final note, I really liked the basketball playing area at ING Bank. The next target is the Garanti Hackathon. Hopefully, if we can secure a place for ourselves there too, see you in the Garanti Hackathon article. Stay well, may God bless you..