Nagpur techies to connect with China in hackathon event

NAGPUR: About 200 software engineers from Nagpur and about 2,000 from China (including some from US) will jointly work on developing a software for optimization of data storage for governments.


This three-day live (online) exercise from Thursday to Saturday will be held in Nagpur and Shenzhen in a

hackathon event

organized by China. The best software will be awarded and will be put in open access stack for community use across the globe.

Prashant Mishra, CEO of Click2Cloud, a software company from city, told TOI that this is the first time that software engineers from India are participating in such a big open sourcing project with China, that too from a single city.

It will include participants from Click2Cloud, Persistent Systems, Global Logics, Infocept, Infosys from city and students from engineering colleges like the VNIT, Raisoni Engineering College, Ramdeobaba Engineering College and other colleges in city.

These engineers will be simultaneously developing the software sitting at the Click2Cloud office in city on their laptops and in China. They will be connected through a server in the office and will work all three days from 9am to 5pm. The engineers and students will be writing code or new features for open stack cloud online.

“This is both a testing and a learning exercise. It will act like an incubator for innovation. It will help develop software which can be used especially by start-ups free as they have little finances. It is basically for the open sourcing community which promotes global innovation and research. This is the 9th such

hackathon

for China,” said Mishra.

The basic purpose of the hackathon is to generate software for improving the huge archival data available with the government in various sectors. Though a lot of the data has already been digitized, this exercise will help develop new software codes to store such data in an optimum way.

The best part of the exercise is that it will be done in a fixed time by fixed people and not at leisure as is the case otherwise in any software industry. “No revenue will be generated from the hackathon as the selected best software will be put in open access for the community,” said Mishra.

Mishra said that next year he plans to hold a similar hackathon at Nagpur for software engineers from across the world. “India was way behind in open source stacking,” he said.

The hackathon is supported by leaders in field like Intel, Tencent, Apache, Cloud Native, The Linux Foundation and CESI.