On the 19th of November 2024, I participated in Hack The Future, a hackathon organised in Antwerp. I did not win, but I had a good time regardless. More about that in this blog post.
The journey to Antwerp
Howest organised a bus to take us to Antwerp, but I delayed signing up for it, so when I finally wanted to sign up all seats were taken. Oops.
No worries though, I took the train to Antwerp, together with Lowie, a fellow student and my teammate. I started the train in Ostend, and Lowie entered the train in Bruges. We arrived in Antwerp around 8:30 AM, which was before the event started, so we had some time to kill. We went and got some coffee and breakfast (which was offered for free by the event).
| Jensen eating bread | Lowie drinking coffee |
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Sorry Lowie and Jensen for the massive images of you, I just had to use them.
The challenge
Our challenge was to find the best possible planet to live on, using some data to be found by ourselves. We thought we signed up for a machine learning challenge, but it turned out to be everything except that. Unfortunate, but at least we had fun.
Intermezzo: The Zoo of Antwerp
The event took place right next to the Zoo of Antwerp, so during the lunch break, me and most students went to the zoo. It was a nice break from the hackathon, and we got to see some cool animals.
| Penguins | Monkey | Another monkey |
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The winners
We did not win our challenge 😃
We weren't even nominated 😂
My apologies for the bad quality of the two images above, but they are screenshots taken from a video, sooooooo 🙄
Teams GIT GUD and BIG MAC ended up winning our challenge. I'm sure they did a great job, but I don't remember who was who.
I can't recall what the winners got, but I think a friend of mine there said it was a 3D printer (don't quote me on this), which is pretty cool.
The losers
The losers (us included) received a goodie bag with some snacks, a powerbank, and a "vier-op-een-rij" game.
On the train ride back home, we tried to play the game, but its quality was bad, so we gave up and just ate the snacks.
