Reviews, News and Opinion with a Canadian Perspective

Recently the Masters of Code hackathon series hit Montreal and almost 120 coders, MasterCard staff, mentors and sponsors gathered for 24 hours of extreme coding. With a kickoff from MasterCard Canada’s President Brian Lang and prize presentations from Mung Ki Woo, Executive Vice President, Digital Products and Solutions at MasterCard, the event showed developers in Montreal just what it takes to win a MasterCard hackathon.

The Montreal edition of Masters of Code was part of the company’s ongoing outreach to developers and of its commitment to helping today’s tech innovators create tomorrow’s best technology. MasterCard worked with a number of local incubators, schools and their lead sponsor, National Bank of Canada, to get the word out to developers across the city. By the time Masters of Code started on Saturday morning the event was almost completely sold out.

Hosted in Notman House, Montreal’s main tech hub, the hackathon included door prizes, a midnight poutine bar and the promise that the winning team would travel to Sillicon Valley to compete in the grand finale for $100,000. Team FairShare won the Canada title with an app that helps travelling groups easily split expenses and settle shared costs via the payment aspect of the app.

The format of the competition is standard. The challenge is "innovation using commerce technology to connect people around the world." Developers mingle and form teams and MasterCard introduces Open APIs. Then the teams determine their concept and develop it and ultimately present it to a panel of judges. All within 24 hours. No time for sleep but apparently Red Bull is popular.

The judging criteria is scored out of 25 points and considers Impact, Design, Creativity, Simplicity and Usage of MasterCard's APIs

MasterCard is currently globetrotting in search of the world's best Coders. Winners of each Hackathon regional event will be flown to Silicon Valley to compete for the title of Masters of Code in the Grand Finale December 5-6, 2015.