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Tanda calls all ‘hackers, hipsters and IT heroes' for the Hackathon
BRISBANE’s leading programmers, designers and developers will compete at Tanda’s Annual Hackathon next weekend (April 22-23) for the opportunity to market their creations to the world.
The Tanda Hackathon started as a programming competition designed to bring Brisbane’s best programmers and developers together to “create and build something incredible” according to Tanda co-founder Alex Ghiculescu. 
He said the event was all about encouraging innovation and design opportunities for Brisbane’s next generation of tech legends and has quickly grown to be Brisbane’s largest Hackathon.
“The hackathon is so important, because it provides a chance for students in the programming community to get together and bounce ideas off each other,” Mr Ghiculescu said.
“When I was at uni, there were no opportunities for programmers to get together and practice their ‘art’. The Hackathon offers programmers a chance to get excited about what they do, and to meet others who love it just as much.
“It’s a really fun atmosphere to be part of – you can literally see the sparks flying as people get excited about their ideas.”
Mr Ghiculescu said the Hackathon was a natural extension of the progressive ethos of the Tanda team.
“We started Tanda because the four of us got together and built something cool, but we couldn’t have gotten far without the platform that MYOB and Xero provided for us to build on – that’s what we want to do for others,” he said.
Last year’s winning team, Two Weeks Notice, took out the hotly contested prize after writing an algorithm that could predict with 80 percent accuracy, whether an employee would take a ‘sickie’ in the next fortnight.
Elliott Smith from Two Weeks Notice said, “The Tanda Hackathon was a fun, friendly competition over an interesting dataset. It was great to see all the different solutions that came out of the same set of data. I’m looking forward to defending my title at this year’s event.”
To celebrate the launch of Tanda’s public API, this year’s Hackathon theme is APIs (application program interfaces), which will allow users to build their own apps and businesses around companies like Tanda.
Mr Ghiculescu said the Hackathon was not just “uniting programmers everywhere, but also proving that coding isn’t a boys only club anymore”. The percentage of women attending increased from 5 percent in 2015 to 17 percent in 2016.
Mr Ghiculescu admitted that the event was not just a networking event, but also an opportunity to give back to the university clubs and societies he loved so much at university.
“Forty percent of every ticket sold is going directly back into the University IT and programming clubs and societies – it’s a bit sentimental for me actually,” he said.
“The clubs encourage students to work on their skills but also to be proud and passionate about their area of study- it’s a mission I strongly agree with and I think it’s important to encourage this culture of ideas.”
The competition will be judged by Technology One group director of research and development Brett Hooker, Skydive Australia Group technology manager Adrian Karzon, and IT legend John Puttick, the founder of GBST and a QUT Council member.
Tanda, initially started by four QUT students, is a time and attendance software designed to assist business in increasing their productivity and profitability, by minimising unnecessary wage costs.
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