Fullspeed Technologies Inc. in its seven years of existence held its first ever hackathon last June 12 and 13, 2024. Department Manager Koji Nishiyama conceptualized the event while assisted by yours truly. This was a team building activity for one of our engineering team. The team were informed about it 2 weeks prior to the hackathon days, that a hackathon is likely to happen. The tough things however is that each team members’ priority didn’t change, they have features and issue tickets to analyze, solve, test, and deliver. At the end of each working day, the only thing that can be done is to study services providing Generative AI.

Yes! You’re reading it right - the team is going to be developing a proof of concept application in a span of 2 days using Generative AI without any prior working experience on Generative AI services. You can say that they’ve heard of the features already, who wouldn’t? it’s all over the internet. And that they definitely have some ideas what features to use, but I can tell you with certainty that they have not created any application prior to the hackathon day using Generative AI services.

The department has two distinguished team leaders, each leading a team in the Hackathon. Let’s call them Team 1 and Team 2.

Team 1

Features

Generate Image	Image Swap	Avatar Generation

API’s

• Gemini

Team 2

Architecture

Features

API’s

• Gemini
• Elevenlabs

Initial Thoughts

The features implemented aren’t ground breaking but these features considered well the ethics of using Generative AI and what is currently acceptable or possible with privacy landscape.

When the teams were asked pre-hackathon about privacy consideration, they both mentioned explicit permission in the settings of the app.

Commemorative Token

Hackathons are not meant to dish out fully functionng applications but the two team successfully built prototypes. As prototypes, they are meant to be iteratively improved, this is part of the culture we have. And as we would like to emphasize this through a little token for all who participated, we designed and produced something that will remind them of that as they use it.

This of course is not the only prize we provided for the winning team. For now, we are happy to have demonstrated and proven the flexibility of our teams to tackle implementations that they have not worked on before.

We hope this serves as one of the many public proofs of how you can accelerate with Fullspeed.

Thank You Teams & Teams

It takes teams and teams of people to get a hackathon going. We wished everyone could have participated and witnessed the First Hackathon done at Fullspeed. We didn’t have a full team for the event but we started good.

Expect us to plan more internal hackathons!

Can you guess who won? Would you choose them to be the winners, and what would your criteria be?