Hacking Culture

Since a very young age, I've always experimented with a bunch of tools. There was Legos, Electronics and later Web Pages, Photography and Photoshop.

Each time I hacked, I got more and more involved into these areas, and also better at them. Hacking gave me freedom to do whatever I wanted to do. Hacking made me discover what I love to do.

LEGO close-up from Startup Week Conference (now Pioneers Festival), which I've volunteered as a photographer.

Nowadays, since I enrolled in college, I still hack in several areas. That's how I got hooked up on Ruby on Rails, Javascript, CoffeeScript, SASS, LESS, Backbone.js, UX, Growth Hacking, Design Thinking. Again, hacking made me learn what I love to do — front-end engineering.

That's why I love hackathons. In a short period of time, you get the change of doing something you've always wanted to to, merely because you want something to exist. It also gives you the change to meet people who feel the same as you do. Those people have, most likely, the same expectations as you do — build something you want and learn from it.

HackNY Student Hackathon — Credits: Elena Olivo.

That's why I felt the need for making more hackathons. I talked with some close friends — those who think the way I do about the hacking culture — and decided to get our hands dirty and organize one ourselves. I've looked at some previous hackathons and we've really liked what the guys of Improve Coimbra were doing. We decided to do something similar in Porto. After receiving green light from them, we opened Improve Portugal — an hackathon aimed for solving problems of local communities.

Three great projects were born through Improve Portugal:

• Operação STOP — a simple mobile and web application where traffic police operations and speed radars, which have recently been seen, can be reported and consulted by anyone on a simple map interface.

  

  Operação STOP — hacked by André Barbosa, Hélder Moreira, Joel Ferreira and Pedro Chambino.

• Deliciously Portugal — a simple mobile and web application where traffic police operations and speed radars, which have recently been seen, can be reported and consulted by anyone on a simple map interface.

  
  
  

  Deliciously Portugal — hacked by Luís Ramos, Pedro Pontes, Rui Neves and Tiago Babo.

• Started in Portugal — a simple mobile and web application where traffic police operations and speed radars, which have recently been seen, can be reported and consulted by anyone on a simple map interface.

  
  
  

  Started in Portugal — hacked by Bruno Costa, João Figueiredo and Tiago Varela.