In less than a week hackers (preferably known as programmers when talking to law enforcement officers) from across the emirate will gather together at Microsoft’s local headquarters to be a part of the most prestigious club when it comes to hacking. I am of course talking about the Dubai chapter of AngelHack.
To the unlearned, AngelHack is the world’s largest and most vibrant global community of hackers, codemakers, codebreakers and changemakers who focus on harnessing the power of hackers for the greater good, to drive innovation of tech products, platforms and brands, and to ultimately bring about change. The good sort of change, not the world ending Tony-Stark-Rebooting-A-Dormant-Ultron sort of change.
To achieve these goals AngelHack organise and host events, each containing a “Hackathon”, a 24 hour event where hackers of all skill levels gather, team up, and try to bring their ideas to life in the small window of time they’re allocated. As a result people usually exit from a Hackathon sleep deprived but with a smile on their face, knowing they accomplished something of value and at the very least, had a great learning experience.
As a result AngelHack Dubai is sure to garner a lot of attention from the local community of programmers, all eager to have a platform from which their ideas can gain fruition. Another incentive is of course an exclusive invitation to AngelHack’s HACKcelerator program, a 12-week pre-accelerator program designed to help the top teams further refine their ideas to ultimately decide if they want to become a startup. There’s also over $100,000 in sponsor prizes; a Samsung Gear II watch for individual team members is one of the awards for a competition. If that isn’t enticing enough, lots of games are available to play and more importantly, a heavenly amount of food is also promised. Not forgetting the post event parties to let you relax after a stressful day of coding/gaming/eating. Probably lot’s of eating.
If you’re salivating at the thought of this much awesomeness then you should know that AngelHack Dubai kicks off on May 8th, with doors opening at 9 AM (with a lovely “Breakfast of Champions” to ensure we start off with enough energy to see us through the weekend). After talks from sponsors, the Hackathon itself will begin at 12 PM and that’s where the fun begins. for a grueling 24 hours, teams will try to bring their ideas to life in an epic, Hunger Games-ish (disembowelment and causing bodily harm is of course against the rules), fight to achieve first place. At precisely 1PM the Hackathon ends with teams submitting their work (finished or not) to AngelHack’s hackathon.io with demos of the submissions being presented at 2 PM. The finale (read lots of prizes!) beings at 6 PM, which is when the winners are announced!
Register and buy your tickets here.
The Absolute Geeks team will be on site capturing every miniscule detail of the event (lots of pictures of good food), documenting the entire event, recording how ideas formed in the recesses of brains are given life in just 24 hours.
