Twenty students, five teams, two locations, and one shared goal – combine cloud technologies with creative solutions to digitalize student cafeterias. That’s what this year’s “5 Days in the Clouds” hackathon looked like, organized by Levi9 in collaboration with EESTEC from Novi Sad.
When Ideas Move to the Cloud
After a successful challenge phase where participants individually showcased their skills, on Saturday, November 29th, teams were formed to continue tackling the cafeteria operations problem, where long queues and crowds often form due to limited time. The solution? A meal reservation system that must be deployed on AWS Cloud.
Three teams emerged in Novi Sad – Velika Menza, Mala Menza, and Bulevar Menza, while in Belgrade, teams Menza Lola and Menza Tri Kostura got to work. Building upon solutions from challenge phase, each team received a set of additional functionalities to implement: from scanning student IDs via AWS Textract, through email notifications via Amazon Simple Notification Service, to cafeteria restriction systems and meal number limitations.
First Encounter with Cloud - A Challenge Worth Taking
Given that we switched from “Java” to “clouds” a few years ago, what made this competition special was the introduction to AWS technologies for most participants. As one team put it: “For all of us, this was the first time doing something like this – cloud deployment, Lambda functions, serverless architecture… But we learned from each other and mentors were available when we got stuck.”
The challenges were diverse – from databases that took seven minutes to spin up, through switching from Java solutions to Python, all the way to Git conflicts when multiple people work on the same code.
But these very challenges showed how important it is not to give up. As one participant said: “Maybe we lost half our time on bugs, but it was interesting solving problems. That’s part of our job.”
When AI Becomes a Team Member
An interesting detail from this year’s hackathon – all teams used AI tools to make the best use of the limited hackathon time. “ChatGPT and Claude definitely speed up development,” one team admitted. “But we made sure to understand what was happening, not just copy-paste code.”
That’s exactly what Levi9 cultivates – technology is a tool but understanding and teamwork are what make the difference.
More Than Code - New Friends and Mentorship
“Our team members became good friends by the end,” shared one participant. And that’s perhaps the most important outcome of this hackathon.
Levi9 mentors – experienced developers and testers – were there to provide support and advice when things didn’t go according to plan. “The help with communication between services and AWS resource configuration meant the most to us,” students emphasized.
What Did Students Take Away?
Besides practical skills in working with AWS services – API Gateway, Lambda functions, S3, Textract, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS – students learned something even more important:
- teamwork under pressure: how to organize, divide tasks, and step in for each other when needed;
- resilience to failure: when you go down the wrong path, it’s important to know when to stop and try differently;
- concrete skills: Git workflow, code review, documentation, deployment;
- cloud-first thinking: how to design scalable architecture from day one.
“This was definitely the first, but not the last hackathon we’ll participate in,” one team concluded.
A Tradition That Continues
The “5 Days in the Clouds” hackathon has a 19-year tradition, and many of today’s Levi9 seniors and architects had their first encounter with the company through this very competition. This is no coincidence – because at Levi9, we believe the best way to learn is through real challenges, with mentorship from experienced colleagues, and in an atmosphere where mistakes aren’t disasters but opportunities to learn something new.
See you next year – in the clouds!
