Is over! The
Hackathon is over and boy, did it fly.
This hackathon was about messing around with a
fixed set of open APIs and come up with a good app. We got together into teams and TED +
Red Gate put the WiFi, the space, the food and the beer (which I had to miss).
I'm reasonably happy with our outcome, because for the time given you can't really expect much more. Only finding out what was available in those APIs and agree between
7 people what to do took us 40% of the time. Once we knew what to do, the coding fun began.
What we came up with was a very simple way of putting in perspective what very little it takes to help developing countries. Or what could've been done with the staggering amounts of money companies in developed countries raise. For example, Spinvox's first round of funding could've funded over 100,000 health related businesses in Sierra Leone through
Kiva. Awesome.
Couple of guys putting together a Ruby backend for the API (including caching requests, as most APIs are limited to a certain amount of request per IP), couple of guys putting together HTML + Ajax to read the data and pass it to Flash and I did a little Flash widget to display the data. Fairly simple, but we got it working.
[UPDATE] We
won : )
Ventropy is up and running! [/UPDATE]
Interesting to see what other people did. We were very, very pragmatic. Thought about using SVN or GIT, but settled for using Dropbox and worked really well. We got something working as soon as we could and added small improvements till the deadline. Should we take the project to the real life, I very much doubt we would keep anything we coded, though. Other people went for a complete setup (source control, a website, DB abstraction) and I think that time could've been better used in something else, but I'm not part of the jury : )
The day was totally worth it, but to me it felt like a sprint more than a marathon. 3 years ago,
Yahoo's Hackday in London was a full weekend of coding. Much more time to code, learn, develop ideas and network. Sure, the time pressure was a funny incentive, but i like more the
"what can you do in 48hrs?" thing. Still, thanks to the organizers and the sponsors.
Sadly I had to leave just after the last presentation and to top it up I'm also going to miss the main
TEDXCam conference next weekend. Why would I miss such an event, specially when we got free tickets for participating in the Hackathon?
Well, next weekend is the
Xtreme Geek Weekend - Barcelona Edition.
Stay tuned!