We are so excited that you are able to join us for the Codess Hackathon on the 11th October.    We hope it will be an enjoyable day full of inspiration, collaboration and a chance to meet many talent women. We are welcoming all levels of technical, design and product experience and will provide a safe environment for you all to learn and experiment with technology, and hopefully create some unique software projects for two great causes. Please see below all the preparation details.

The Challenges

CoderDojo Challenge - Hack to help this cool non-profit create additional social and learning opportunities for their youth and parent network.

Black Girls Code Challenge - Hack to help this awesome non-profit achieve even great success and reach by finding a way to manage volunteer engagement!

Disaster Response Challenge - Sponsor: Direct Relief: build a game to help organizations and communities prepare for effective response after natural disasters

We's also like to announce that we have 2 amazing individuals speaking at this event!

Introduction by Lilian Rincon : Group Program Manager, Skype and a trailblazer in the tech industry!  Read more about Lilian here: http://aka.ms/eogue7

Keynote by Gurdeep Pall : Global CVP, Skype and a pioneer in building what internet is today. Read more about Gurdeep here: http://aka.ms/rvwnta

• Once registered for the hackathon, tick I’m looking for teammates and don’t forget to give a brief description here of the project you want to lead or get involved in, and the tech stack you plan on using.
• If you hope to lead a project, in the weeks leading up to the hackathon, you can Update your Portfolio and add more details on the software project you will be working on including the name and tagline – this will be useful to prepare ahead of the hackathon day - just make sure you keep your project visible to share with others
• For those that don’t fancy leading a project, and want to join someone else’s project – click connect with the person whose project interests you the most and drop them a message letting them know you are interested.  They can then add you to the project team.

If you have your own development environment please feel free to use it on the day, or if you would like to use our technologies – please feel free to download here:

Free Visual Studio trials - http://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs

Free Azure trial - http://akams/mscloudtrial

Free Visual Studio Online trial (for managing products and storing code) http://www.visualstudio.com/products/what-is-visual-studio-online-vs

If you are eligible for BizSpark – you can also sign up here: https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/signup/default.aspx

• Technical
  
• Originality and Impact
  
• User experience and functionality
  
• Theme