birmingHack

birmingHack is the annual hackathon that CSS runs, started in 2025. It is typically run toward early / mid March, though when planning you will need to check with SoCS staff to see when the open days / Offer Holder Visit Days (OHVD) are, as you won't be able to run the event on a weekend if it clashes with one of these days.

Past schedules can be found in the google drive, refer to these for how the day runs.

For birmingHack you need to plan a lot of things to ensure the event runs smoothly. These things are:

• Food
• Tracks + Prizes
• Sponsors
• Theme
• Hackathons UK
• Who on committee is going to be there
• Security
• Room Bookings (Talk to Mo)
• Tickets
• Website
• Standby Queue

Its a lot of work so make sure you get on top of it as soon as you can

For food you need to feed people 2 lunches, dinner and breakfast.

For dinner it will most likely be pizza, which you will need to add a form onto the tickets to know what pizzas to order. You should pre-order most of these beforehand through papa johns because you can get a small discount from them and also they will get very annoyed at you if you order them on the day. Figure out how many you need using the pizza tracker with 4 slices per person buying XXL pizzas, but don't preorder for everyone as a few people wont show up (usually around 70% show up)

For lunch we have done sandwich platters in the past. The easiest (and best) is from Sainsbury's, but to do this you need to order them at least 4 days in advance. Ensure you get vegan and gluten free food for people that need it as well. Worst case you can get sandwiches from CostCo but they aren't as good.

For breakfast just get random breakfast things like croissants and pain au chocolats and fruit and stuff. What you get depends on how much money you have.

If ramadan is occuring during birmingHack make sure you account for this, save food for them for iftar and ensure they have breakfast early. Also unrelated to food but try to get them a room for prayer as we had a small issue once of them praying on the staircase which is a fire hazard.

We have personally done 3 tracks in the past: Best Hack, Most Fun Hack and Best Newcomer. You will need to provide prizes for these, with Best Hack having the most expensive prize, and the other tracks the prize will depend on how much money you have from sponsors.

We have previously done collabs with AFNOM, AlgoSoc and GDS in previous birmingHacks in order to have extra tracks for participants to enter, adding more things for people to do. Talk to societies and ensure they are happy to run them and if they will be providing prizes or not.

Hackathons UK also do a track at birmingHack and will give out a prize. They are also very helpful with grading and figuring out who won as well as other things that will be mentioned in their own section.