A couple of weeks ago we held the first European Online Sourcing Hackathon and right now we are ready to reveal the secrets of hacking our sourcing cases. If you know other ways to tackle these problems, don’t hesitate to share them with us.

Task 1. I’ve heard about a guy who is the most active Zotonic (Erlang web framework) contributor.
Find his home address (street address, city)

Correct answer: Catharina Van Clevepark, Amstelveen

Firstly, you should google “Zotonic Contributor”. The third link in the output leads to the main page of Zotonic repository on Github which has 63 contributors. In the contributors’ list, you can see that Marc Worrel (@mworrel) is the most active one. Not much is left to do for now. Visit “http://whatwebwhat.com/”, the site that Marc has linked to his GitHub account. Then go to the “About&Contact” section where Marc has shared a PDF version of his resume. At the top of the resume is Marc’s address: Catharina Van Clevepark, Amstelveen.

Task 2. On a well-known academic website, I saw a long PDF file that had a very interesting section related to blockchain and its repercussions in the online educative sphere. I believe that the authors were Polish.
What was the title?

Correct answer: The Impact of the Digital World on Management and Marketing

The task requires the use of Boolean operators and also some creativity. Simple googling “filetype:PDF AND Blockchain AND Education AND Poland” won’t lead you to the answer.
Let’s look further into the task. For instance, the reference to online education seems important and the online education sphere is mostly represented by Online courses. Let’s try to add that to our search query. “filetype:PDF AND Blockchain AND Education AND “Online courses” AND Poland” This will get closer to success with the right article, “The Impact of the Digital World on Management and Marketing”, in the seventh place in the Google search output.

However, you would still need to spend time excluding the previous articles by reading them and finding the irrelevant ones. What would you do here? You could have either assumed the name of the well-known academic site (1) or made an assumption that Polish authors writing about Blockchain (a new disrupting technology) came from the leading schools in Economics in the country (2).

(1) If you are well aware of the academic sites, you could have added them to the search query: “filetype:PDF AND Blockchain AND Education AND “Online courses” AND Poland AND (Researchgate OR Academia OR Mendeley OR JSTOR)”. Thus, you will get “The Impact of the Digital World on Management and Marketing” as the first result in the search output.
(2) According to QS World University Rankings, Warsaw School of Economics and University of Warsaw are the best ones in the country. Using “filetype:PDF AND Blockchain AND Education AND “Online courses” AND Poland AND “University of Warsaw” AND “Warsaw School of Economics” ” would output only one result which is the needed article, “The Impact of the Digital World on Management and Marketing”.

This task has been solved by only one participant, who is also our winner, Anna Golubchenko.

Task 3. She is a Scala developer from Avast. One of her blogs is about software development.
When did she publish her first post?(dd/mm/year)

Correct answer: 30/06/2014

Just google “Scala developer AND Avast AND LinkedIn”. The second result shows the LinkedIn profile of Alena Varkočková, who is both working at Avast and a Scala developer. At Alena’s LinkedIn profile there are links to her blog (which aren’t working now) and to her twitter account (@alenkacz). On her Twitter account, there is the working link to Alena’s blog that starts with a post on the 30th of June 2014.

If you do not have access to LinkedIn, you could have googled “Alena Varkočková” after finding out that she is the one. Googling her name also leads to her Twitter account with the working link to the blog.

Task 4. Benjamin Winterberg is a Full Stack Developer from Germany.
Find his personal phone number (10 digits without the country code)

Correct answer: 1608055088

Google “Benjamin Winterberg Full Stack Developer”. The first result shows you the link to his personal website. Now be prepared for a truly powerful hack: simply go to https://www.whois.com/whois/ , insert the link to Benjamin’s site and get all the information about him as the site owner, including his phone number: 1608055088

Task 5. There is a guy who has organized the PyData-Wroclaw meetup.
What is his birthplace? (city)

Correct answer: Arona.

Let’s start by looking up “PyData-Wroclaw meetup” in Google. The first two links in the search output are meetup.com pages of that event. Go to any of the two and scroll down to see Christian Barra listed as an organizer.
A simple google search for Christian Barra would lead you to his GitHub page that contains a link to his personal website. The work is pretty much done. Go to the “about me” section on his website and find his place of birth right away!
By the way, you can always just search for Christian Barra “born in” and look into the 5th link in the search output.

Task 6. I bumped into a guy from Toulon on Stack Overflow talking about the new .net core framework, He is a really cool dude, likes music and he told me he was teaching in a school in his free time but I can’t remember which one…
Can you remind me?

Correct answer: ISEN / L’ISEN.

Try googling “site:stackoverflow.com users .net core framework France”. The first search result is a Stack Overflow profile of “kall2sollies”. If you go to his profile, you will see that he has actually listed music and photography as a hobby and he’s got long hair. Go to his developer story page, scroll down to the first note: Freelance teacher at ISEN Engineer school. Good job!

You can also find his LinkedIn page, where he has mentioned teaching at ISEN Engineering School. To do that, first of all, find his real name by googling his nickname “kall2sollies”. You will find his Flickr page with his real name in the search output. After that, finding him on LinkedIn is a piece of cake!

Task 7. You want to find someone who follows both “Hirin’Geeks” and “Mobile Startups” Facebook groups and who is really into sourcing. Let’s say, you would like to “casually” bump into him tonight.
Where will he probably be?

Correct answer: Picasso.

Try running a search query in Intelligent Search extension: people > group member “hiring geeks” AND group name “mobile startups”. The first result in the search output is Sergey Dmitrichenko (CEO of AmazingHiring). Use stalkface.com or https://www.facebook.com/search/profileID/events (NO LONGER AVAILABLE) to see what events the person is planning to attend. To find the numeric profile ID, just open the person’s profile photo and copy the sequence of numbers in the link before “&type”. You won’t see the Picasso event, because Dmitry is no longer planning to attend it, but you will definitely see some up-to-date events.

We are already planning new hackathons and webinars for you, so follow the news!