Summer Hackathon 2012: Inside Look
With a variety of creative projects at this year’s Summer Hackathon, there’s no doubt that it will be difficult to choose just one winner. This competitive atmosphere drove most teams to work behind closed doors the night of the event, but now that the projects are nearly complete, some teams are ready to show off their coded creations. Two Tagged interns share accounts of their Hackathon projects:
Lucas Thoresen, SE Intern, Team “Here”
We wanted this summer’s hackathon to reflect the direction of the tech industry, so we chose “mobile” as our theme. Even though many of us were new to iOS/Android development, a lot of our hackathon teams came up with some really brilliant ideas.
You’ve probably guessed it by now, but many of us chose project ideas with a social discovery undertone as Tagged is sitting at the forefront of this new genre in computing. Product designer Brett Lyon and I took this approach with our idea and were able to recruit a surprisingly large team during the pitching round.
The “Here” mobile application is designed to combine two interesting concepts — Social Discovery and Geocaching — to form a new mobile application that lets users share content by putting their stuff (pictures, videos, personal profiles, text, etc.) in a virtual container. These “bundles” are dropped on the ground in augmented reality space, and when another user with the application comes near the virtual container, they get a push notification on their phone saying that they’ve stepped on someone’s capsule and are given the option to open it.
Brett and I sketching plans for the "Here" app.
Lester Kakol, SE Intern, “Secret Awesome Team”
I’ve been here since May as an intern on the People Relevance Algorithms Team, but for these 12 hours I got to be a part of the Secret Awesome Team, which is obviously the best team that has ever competed in a Tagged hackathon.
Over the course of the night, the Secret Awesome Team worked on its secret awesome project, which I’ll share with you because there’s a good chance that it’s leaked by now. The idea comes from Two Truths and a Lie, a classic icebreaker sort of game, except we’re implementing this for the Internet. We re-imagined the game and implemented it for the mobile web.
After we assembled our team, we needed to find an answer to the question “what are we actually building?” The next step was to spec out API functions and database schema, and with this finished we were finally ready to start working. The first step toward building this was getting some sort of collaboration utility set up. After an unfortunate snafu with a local repository being deleted, our team was able to use Git to collaborate. Once we were all ready to start writing, we began implementing the specs we created during our planning phase and bringing designs from the wireframes to life.
I worked on the back end and spent my time writing the APIs that allow the front end to place requests for data and other things that are occasionally useful. We organized things as they tend to be throughout the Tagged.com site: Oracle database, PHP sitting on top of that, with JavaScript/HTML on top of that. For being such a small team, we were actually quite diverse, with front-end engineers, back-end engineers, a product team, and a design team!
My team and I pose with our custom-made T-shirts.
Everyone came together and each individual contributed in a unique way. I can’t imagine that our project would be at the point it is now if we were missing anybody. Go Team!
We’re excited to see what the future holds for these new apps and look forward to seeing the other Hackathon projects finally revealed. Who knows? Maybe one of them will turn out to be the next big thing!
Check out more photos on Flickr.
