The Arctic SharePoint Challenge was held for the 5th year in a row in Oslo Norway on February 26th-28th. It’s a three day hackathon where teams battle to win the reindeer antlers trophy, together with fame and glory. This was my forth time attending the event, where I’ve been a participant three times, a judge one, and this year also part of the organizing committee.
If you want to know more about the event and how teams are scored, head over to the ASPC web site.
As with previous years we had four judges, where we invited a couple of new guys this year – all the way from the U.S.
Marc D Anderson and Chris Givens did an awesome job together with Harald Fianbakken and Christian Nesmark, and they made sure getting badges and points was no easy task.
My team the Puzzlepart Appsters ended up in 4th place this year, an all time low :-(, with the Infozurgs team taking home the trophy. But we’ll be back next year I’m sure!
That said, it was an awesome event and I want to mention the Swedish team from Altran in particular who really brought their game with costumes and awesome team spirit. Make sure to check out their Yoga Word App video.
SharePoint World Champion
For the third time a quiz was hosted in the evening where contestants was divided into random teams where they had to pick the right answer on a whopping 31 questions. It was a difficult quiz indeed and the team I was part of scored the most with 18 correct answers.
In Microsoft terms that is NOT a passing score, but the judges let it slide *phew*. The members of the top two teams where then set to battle each other in A/B questions – standing on the correct side of a white line which had been taped to the floor.
That proved quite interesting as people where thinking I knew it all and followed the side I chose. When we were three people left, that proved a smart thing for me, as we all got it wrong and I was still in the competition. I then switched tactics and stood with one foot on each side of the line and barely lifted one foot when the time ran out – and in the end I was crowned the SharePoint World Champion of 2015 – following my colleague Kim Damsleth who won in 2012. Want to beat me? Join next years ASPC 8-)
What we created
The Appsters team did a lot of new fun stuff we hadn’t before. Personally I created a 7zip file preview handler for Office 365 based on the newly released preview API, a fun solution using a big red button from bt.tn as an input device for Word (I’ll do a separate post on that *beep* hardware later - The solution was fun to create as this was my very first attempt at using WebAPI, SignalR and creating a Word App), and I also tested out some Office Graph queries – being the only team to get the Delve 2 badge.All in all I have to say I’m very pleased with the event as one of the organizers this year. As a contestant I’m also happy, although I realize Puzzlepart have to put in more than 30 minutes of preparations next year if we want to be in the top 3 teams – and also party less the first night of the event. I’m blaming Chris and Lidiya for that :), but boy did we have a good time!
All things considered I think Puzzlepart Appsters did a good job ending up in tied 3rd place before the final four 500 point awards was handed out. (I’m convincing myself 4th is not that bad ;-)
Thanks to everyone who participated and the sponsors who made it possible!
