Took part in the Russian Ministry of Agriculture hackathon "Big Livestock Farming".

My home team at Agropromtsifra sent me and one more colleague to represent our company at the Russian Ministry of Agriculture hackathon, organized by Olga Viktorovna Abramova, advisor to the minister, at Timiryazev Academy. My role and the format of the event remained unknown to me right up until the start, which made it intriguing.

I have to admit, I expected to meet students, graduate students, maybe even high schoolers at the hackathon. Imagine my surprise when I realized the room was full of established, successful, and highly experienced representatives of agricultural universities, researchers, livestock specialists, genetics experts, executives from major IT companies, and me :)

The event lasted exactly two days, and all activities ran in full-on collective-brain sweatshop mode, with short breaks for coffee and food. The first day had a lot of talks and presentations. I especially liked the presentations by graduate students from various agricultural universities, who had been tasked with analyzing and presenting an overview of the world's best solutions and achievements in agriculture. It was useful to learn so many new things.

One talk that especially stuck with me was by Vladimir Pirozhkov, representing Sber. He gave a rather inspiring presentation on geopolitics, cause-and-effect links between international conflicts, global warming, logistics, black soil, Bryansk steaks from black cows, and generations Z-alpha. He spoke energetically, interestingly, and inspirationally - enough to make me want to have a fourth child and claim a Far Eastern hectare :)

After lunch, we were divided into teams. Apparently, the distribution was based on the participants' competencies, and I ended up in the IT team under the lucky number 6. Our team turned out to be the smallest one, so there was no escape - we had to get organized. We did it pretty quickly: without unnecessary arguing, we assigned roles and tasks and outlined a work plan. It came together harmoniously and, as practice showed, effectively. Thanks for that to our team lead Anastasia and our curator Alexander - they organized everything very clearly.

By the end of the first day, we loudly announced that the project was 80 percent ready, while the other teams estimated themselves somewhere between 15 and 50 percent. Our logic was that 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and the remaining part takes the remaining 80%. Overall, the estimate was accurate: by the end of day one, we had a team logo, an action plan, homework assignments, and confidence in victory =)

I took on the role of vibe coder to create a wow effect during the presentation. The evening went into vibe coding and filling the prototype with data. I built it in the progressive programming language Vibe++, and it was worth it: we got a solid PWA app that could identify an animal and its condition by sound.

Naturally, the recognition algorithm was extremely simple and based on fuzzy logic, Levenshtein distance, and Manhattan distance to search for similarities in sound patterns. The latter let me down a bit during the demo, but it did entertain the tired audience. Good thing I wrote my dissertation on a somewhat related topic. I spent half the evening oinking, mooing, and clucking into the computer to populate the database.

The second day began with a demo of the prototype for my teammates. They approved of it well enough. One of our participants brought a wonderful rubber pig that oinked quite convincingly. I recorded its sounds for the demo. For several hours we assembled the presentation using the materials my colleagues had prepared at home the day before. I was genuinely pleased by my teammates' drive and their desire to do the work well. We chose our speaker and decided to begin the presentation with the prototype demo.

We presented sixth, according to our team number. The other teams showed very interesting industry solutions, but before us only one team had shown an actual prototype. I could not see it very well, and I did not catch how complex the solution was, but it felt like it had not been assembled in a single evening: there were just too many screens. Still, the participants liked it.

Our presentation began with me connecting my laptop with the app to the big screen and doing what I did. The audience had a great time, especially after our prototype delivered a spectacular oink, identified the piglet as being in good health, then possibly coughing, and then I mooed. Because of an incorrect Manhattan distance calculation in the patterns, the program identified me as a stressed piglet. It was funny. In fairness, I basically was stressed, and it is time to lose weight.

Thank God Anna spoke after me. She is a marketer from an IT company, and without missing a beat, with almost no preparation, she gave an excellent talk and shifted the focus from entertainment to practical value. I wish I could learn to do that.

Then came the public vote: each participant had to attach a green sticker to the solution they liked and also distribute, on paper slips, percentages representing their readiness to invest in the project they liked. After the votes were counted, we collected the most green stickers and took first place in the ranking. Pretty great, honestly.

But another team collected more investment. It is always like this: we bring laughter and joy to the people, while serious gentlemen collect all the money :) Kidding.

I want to say that I really enjoyed the event. The organizers did a great job: the coffee and pastries were tasty, the speakers and tasks were interesting, and the crowd was top class. I walked away elephant-level satisfied.