How did I get the SAP internship?

Like posted in my previous post I was a part of the winning team in the SAP Coding Masters Challenge Competition in the autumn 2012. This hackathon was organized for students, which want to play with new SAP HANA in-memory database and solve exciting assignments with it. There were many different awards for the best teams like Amazon Kindle Fire, Amazon coupons, but the main price was the internship at SAP Innovation Center in Potsdam and at SAP Labs in Palo Alto.

If you like to code and solve challenging assignments for a short time with brand new technologies you are welcome to attend to the next competition, which will take place in Berlin between August 22-24 2013. The registration is available here.

SAP Innovation Center Potsdam

The competition event was organized by SAP Innovation Center in Potsdam. This is a new grounded SAP research organisation, which idea is "bringing in young people with fresh ideas, working in short innovation cycles, and involving end users in all projects". The Innovation Center was grounded 2011 in Potsdam to take usage of several educational institutions of the area such my alma-mater Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam University and Berlin Universities (Technical, Humboldt and Free Universities). Because of many educational and technological institutions, IT Start Ups which are already existing in Potsdam and its neighborhood, this area called Silicon Sanssouci.

Betahouse

The Coding Masters Challenge took place in Berlin in a special co-working space called Betahouse. The Betahouse is a place where freelancer can find a working space, advises of other colleagues and communicate with other people.
Additionally, they can get a coffee or even take an after lunch sleep. Communication is of course the main advantage of the coworking space compared with working alone.

Betahouse

The Competition

Ok, but what is about a competition. All participants were divided into small groups 4-5 people and should solve interesting tasks with Twitter data and Twitter API. Everyone got a colored T-Shirt, which represented our team.

In the first task we should get our fingers dirty and learned the Twitter API. We got all Twitter data collected for 3 months over the public API for the whole world and we should analyze it to answer questions. The Twitter data was saved in JSON format and took ca. 300 GB overall.

The example questions were "Who is more popular Obama or Romeney?" or "What was the first picture posted on the July 2, 2012 in Berlin?" or "Which smile use people in the Europe more often? Group by Country and Smile", etc. We could use every possible technology to parse and analyse the data. But for so many data without database it was not easy. After 4 hours the results of our investigation should be presented in front of other teams. And we got points for every solved task.

In my next post I will tell about following competition assignments and how our team could win the challenge,  where so many smart and competent students from the whole Germany took part.

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