The eight-hour clock started at 10:30 a.m. in Dnipro on a June Saturday. Ten teams of developers — most of them SoftServe engineers — had until late evening to build a mobile application with a social purpose from scratch. They had code editors, coffee, and competitive instincts. What they also had, sitting across the room with a judging rubric rather than a keyboard, was Ivan Bezrukavyi.
Bezrukavyi, a QC Lead at SoftServe, was not there to write code. He was there to evaluate it — to ask the questions that most developers, in the adrenaline of a build sprint, prefer to defer. Does it fail gracefully? What happens at edge cases? Is the user experience actually what the design promised, or just approximately close enough?
The role of expert judge at SoftServe's Hackathon for Developers is not an honorary one. The company specifically invites QA leads and senior architects to evaluate hackathon submissions — not just product managers or senior developers — because the judgment they bring is structurally different. A developer evaluating another developer's work tends to ask: does it do what it was designed to do? A QA lead asks: what will happen when it does something it was not designed to do?
