Telling our stories – Jakob Keller
Each year we meet incredible people at womENcourage™ celebrations. We ask womENcourage participants to tell their stories in blog posts. We continue 2023 with Jakob Keller, who is a bachelor’s degree student in informatics at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway and attended womENcourage 2022 in Cyprus.
My name is Jakob Keller, I’m in my third year of a bachelor’s degree in Informatics at NTNU Norway.
The activity I had the most fun with was the Hackathon, which for me was my first ever Hackathon. It
was a great way to start the conference. The case of the Hackathon was ‘software solutions for
blending the arts with science’, and we had to present our work after 7 hours. The first thing my
group did was brainstorm ideas, this was way more difficult than I thought, but after 20 minutes we
landed on our idea. Our product is called colorMatch, and the idea was that a user could take a photo
of a wall, or a room, and the application would search the database for a painting that would match
with the colors in that room. The paintings in the database would be of hobby-artists, making it easy
for them to sell their art.
My group quickly split into two groups, one for designing and one for coding. Our designers quickly
made a Figma prototype for the coders to look at. While the design was being created, the coders
scanned the internet for APIs to help with our idea. We quickly found two super helpful APIs and
started implementing them in our code. From this point on we just had to code as fast as we could,
and we were loving it, we even skipped lunch to code more. Well, we didn’t skip lunch, we missed it.
After 7 hours we had something to present, and our brilliant designers had also made an economical
‘plan’ and written our presentation. Time for the demo.
I was super nervous, as I always am before a presentation, but it went as well as it could. But it turns
out that hard work and nerves made us even more prepared, and we actually won, which I still can’t
believe.
All in all, the hackathon and the conference were a great time, and I would love to join next year!