I had a chance to participate in Sun Life's Elevate Cloud Tech Hackathon this week. The 5-day event completely took over my week, so I wasn't doing much actual work. I was fortunately able to team up with CI Challenge teammate and fellow co-op student Rishad Luthra, and some of his full time team members Alex Wu and Mahir Khandaker. They were absolutely amazing and I could not have wished for a better team.
Day 1 (Monday)
On Monday, I had the chance to go into the Toronto York office for the event's kick-off. Alex, and Mahir and I were able to meet up in person while Rishad joined us virtually. It generally covered the rules of the hackathon, the judging criteria, what AWS services & other tools we could use, and some general tips for success. There was also a special guest panel with a bunch of Sun Life AVPs and Directors, which was pretty cool.
After the kick-off and the catered lunch (which was amazing), we decided to attend the AWS skill builder workshop. It was very inspiring in terms of how to come up with good ideas, however I wish there was more technical content. I was hoping for a bit more of a deep dive into some of the services that we could use, but I guess that's what the AWS & technical office hours were for.
After the workshop, we met with our mentor Mihai Csaki, who was absolutely amazing and extremely knowledgeable. He was able to help us come up with a solid idea, and gave us some good tips on how to structure our project. We decided that we would make an Amazon Q AI-powered chatbot, integrated with tools frequently used at Sun Life, such as Confluence, Jira, and ServiceNow.
Day 2 (Tuesday)
We spent the remainder of the week working virtually. The day started off with us creating a mockup of what a Sun Life Confluence page would look like, adding information that was realistic but not real. We then worked on connecting Amazon Q to our new Confluence page, and letting it train on the data. The rest of the day was spent debugging and trying to get the chatbot to work properly.
Alex ended up having a breakthrough at around 6pm, and was able to get the chatbot working.
Day 3 (Wednesday)
After hearing the good news from Alex, we trained a new Amazon Q instance on a separate (mock) Confluence page (to demonstrate that it could be trained on any page, and only knows information from what it's trained on). We were also able to integrate the chatbots directly into Confluence, using an iframe. The team also trained the chatbot on some developer documentation, and were able to get it to answer some basic questions.
Day 4 (Thursday)
We spent all day working on the presentation. We created a slide deck, recorded a demonstration video, and practiced our pitch. We also had a meeting with our mentor to go over the presentation, and get some feedback. He was very impressed, and gave us some good tips on how to improve it. The presentation had to be extremely short (5 minutes maximum), so we had to make sure that we were able to get our point across quickly and effectively. I ended up re-recording the demonstration video about 15 times, as I kept messing up my lines, while also trying to ask 5 questions to the chatbot in under 1 minute. We ended up practicing our pitch about 10 times, and I think we were all very confident in it by the end.
Day 5 (Friday)
The day of the presentation! We had to present to a panel of judges, which included some of the AVPs and Directors that were at the kick-off. We were pretty late in the queue, so we ended up having to wait for about 2 hours before we were able to present. The presentation went extremely well, and we were able to get our point across in under 5 minutes. It was impossible to tell if the judges were impressed or not, as they had their cameras off and were muted the entire time.
The presentations ended up taking a lot longer than expected, so we had to wait for about 3 hours before the winners were announced. At best, I was hoping to get at least top 3, as there were some really good projects that were presented. I was extremely surprised when they announced that we had won the hackathon! I was not expecting it at all, and was extremely happy.
It was a great way to end the week, and I was extremely happy with how everything went. I was also very happy to have met and worked with Alex, Mahir, and Rishad. They were all extremely knowledgeable and great to work with. I hope that we can work together again in the future.
Considering that I potentially wasn't going to be participating in the hackathon at all, I am extremely happy with how everything turned out. I was able to learn a lot about AWS services, and how to structure a project.
I would also like to thank the following groups:
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Shraman Gupta, Ashiesh Wadhwa, Kassie K., Beril Clancy, Alicia Tse, as well as the entire SLF C4C and Cloud Engineering Group teams for putting on such an amazing event.
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Rishad Luthra, Alex Wu, and Mahir Khandaker for being such amazing team members. I could not have asked for a better team, and I hope that we can work together again in the future.
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Mihai Csaki for being an amazing mentor. He was extremely pivotal in helping us come up with a solid idea, and gave us some great tips on how to structure our project.
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Michael Pereira for giving me the chance (and permission) to participate in the hackathon.
Fall 2024 Goals Update
I only ended up going bouldering once this week. Earlier in the week, I sliced my thumb open and didn't want to risk getting it infected. I also didn't go swimming or to the gym at all.