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Florida Polytechnic University Students Braving The Developer Deathmatch

Published: March 25, 2015 (Updated: January 15, 2020)

On Friday, Accusoft and Florida Polytechnic University will be hosting an all-day hackathon on the school’s campus lovingly titled, “Developer Deathmatch.”

Hackathons burst onto the scene back in 1999 when a few Canadian developers got together to develop better cryptographic software to address US exportation legal issues. Since then, these popular events have given birth to , and worked out the bugs of plenty of new software, apps, and APIs.

It’s no secret that we love bug hunts at Accusoft. QA Manager, Matthew Sullivan, introduced us to them as a great to work out technical bugs and also closely look at the user experience. But he and the Vice President of Technology Infrastructure, Chris Lubeck, wanted to do more.

The two of them agreed that our barcode SDK, Barcode Xpress, was the right place to start and approached that team’s QA Lead, Sylvia Traxler, for help. Immediately on board, she worked to further develop the idea — but that’s still all it was, an idea.

That is until Sullivan toured the Polytechnic campus in Lakeland, Fla. Impressed with the campus and inspired by the students’ passion for development and the pursuit of their educations, he knew that he’d found the location and participants for the Hackathon.

The Developer Deathmatch will be an all-day event this Friday involving several teams compiled of four students. The teams will battle through 7 progressively more challenging levels working to solve an issue and get a piece of information necessary to complete the next barcode-related level.

The competitors will be vying for the chance to win one of the really awesome prizes available:

1st Prize – Oculus Rift Developer Kit (1)

2nd Prize – Google Cardboard Kits (4)

3rd Prize – Leap Motion VR Developer Kit

All of the competitors will also be receiving awesome Developer Deathmatch t-shirts printed by Ink Screen Printing in Lakeland and plenty of food, snacks and soda to power their eager minds.

To follow along with the action, check out our Twitter feed where I’ll be live tweeting throughout the event. Also, visit the blog again on Monday to read the thrilling recap.