Hacking through a Crisis – Part I: “Should I be worried?”

There is an old proverb attributed to the father of U.S. President, John F. Kennedy that reads, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” More than 3,000 talents from 80 countries “got going” in the recent #CodeVsCOVID19 hackathon organized by HackZurich in collaboration with ETH Zurich and other high level patrons and sponsors. Despite the lack of hackathon fare - free coffee, dozens of pizzas, and the camaraderie that comes with working in the same space for 72-hours straight, hackers produced 306 innovative open-source prototypes to make life easier in this time of crisis. While there may be many others, four teams, comprised primarily of ETH Zurich students and alumni, emerged from the intense coding marathon to share their inspiration, stories, and, more importantly, their prototypes. This is the first in a four-part series highlighting their experiences working virtually #TogETHer.

This code-loving team relied on tools such as GitHub, Jitsi and Zoom to coordinate tasks mainly over video chat, and shared interfaces for their coding modules by text via Slack. While they reported that they really missed the hackathon atmosphere, the virtual environment enabled them to spend more time cooking and sleeping than during a “normal” hackathon event.