Lie-in on the long weekend?! No way! Last weekend I was attending the 2nd Hamburg Hackathon organised by Hamburg Geekettes and App Camps. It was all about awesome - and not to forget - pitching (!) ideas, creativity, motivated people and fantastic final presentations in a great atmosphere and cool setting. Curious for more?
The event started with API presentations of well-known companies such as XING, Twitter, Braintree/PayPal, SoundCloud or Sony. Even though it was on short notice, I was given a time slot to also present the ePages REST API.
When it came to pitching our ideas, I pulled out mine: build a simple ePages Android app using the Ionic framework and AngularJS. But as there were so many pitches, there weren’t enough supporters for mine. Could be worse! I was ready to hack! I joined the “Runanas” pitch, that matched my interest and I thought would be much fun developing. The goal was to build an app that uses the Sony LifeLog API to find a matching jogging partner.
Within 24 hours (Honestly! Some team members survived without even a snatch of sleep) we worked with 8 team members to create the “Runanas App” using the Sony SmartWatch 3. One part of the team concentrated on the backend part (realised with Django and SQLite), that connects to the Sony API as well as on the prototype development using Android Studio. The other part of the team focused on the business case and the graphics. We actually managed to create a running prototype! Yay!
We established a real data exchange
- between the “Runanas” app and the Sony API to our backend
- from the app to our backend
- from the app to the Sony SmartWatch 3.
When the presentations started, we had 2.5 minutes to present our results to the audience. We were very excited! To achieve our goal, it was all about producing a good mood in the audience, presenting the API that we’ve used and doing a short demo.
And then….Drum roll… We impressed Sony with our solution and won the Sony SmartWatch 3!
It has been an inspiring and cool weekend with many new ideas and impulses. On my way home, I have not only lots of new experience in my luggage, but also good learnings I can pass on to my colleagues here at ePages. Never stop learning… We are definitely ready for the next hackathon. Stay tuned!
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