These last two weeks have been crazy. Mathias Hansen has been to three conferences in that time, I attended two of them, and together we have a combined travel distance of over 10,000 miles! It’s been a while since my last blog post, so I’d like to share with everyone the details of our successful and very fun time at our last conference, eCommerce HackDay, organized by Dwolla .
eCommerce HackDay is no ordinary conference or convention — if you would even call it that. It’s about competing developers, who love all-things-code, binging for a 24-hour hackathon to create the most elaborate, creative, and complex project they possibly can. Personally, I’ve never been to a sponsored hackathon — only the small ones Engage or my buddies host — so I actually had no idea what to expect.
The second we arrived at the Hackathon, you could see people were hardcore developers. I mean, to even be invited you needed to crack a code and puzzle by programming your way though a series of HTTP requests. It was surreal. All around us were developers from big-league companies such as TokBox, Stripe, Etsy, Twilio, SendGrid, and Amazon to name a few. It was exciting and frightening to think we would be hacking in competition against such skilled people. There was even a “HackStar” attending who “wins hackathons for a living”!
The hackathon started with some introductions, ground-rules, and an overall good time. Mathias and I purposely partnered-up by ourselves to see how far we could push ourselves as a working team against the many experienced developers. In just 24-hours we came up with an idea, programmed it, and won two-awards for our finished project.
The project we built is called tips.io. tips.io is a self-post platform where anyone with a Dwolla account can offer small “tips” or bounties for awesome, insightful, and helpful answers to their questions or requests about any subject. It’s a pretty simple concept that creates incentives for people to really put a strong interest in responding to questions with a serious and well-thought out answer.
tips.io is built on Codeigniter, the Dwolla API, and TokBox’s OpenTok. We used my custom Codeigniter templating engine and a custom Bootstrap competitor that uses the Metro design philosophy. I plan to open-source and release both of those projects as soon as I possibly can. As we were developing, Mathias found three bugs in Dwolla’s PHP SDK and created a custom Codeigniter Library for it. Mind you, this was all done in a 24-hour period! It kind of gives you insight into why these awesome companies host things like this. We also got to speak with a developer at TokBox, who we think we may have coincidentally spoken to for support while using their API previously on XG.
In the end we presented our project in front of nearly 200 people — not counting the one’s watching it from home with Google Hangouts. We were both super nervous but overall had a very successful presentation. In competition against 27 different teams our tips.io ended up winning the awards for “Best Use of API” from Dwolla and “Best Use of OpenTok”. We were ecstatic because we were aiming to win both those awards. The prizes were two Ouyas and a Google Nexus 7!
To wrap this up, it was an amazing experience. We received some serious insight to the eCommerce industry, and it gave us a lot of potential ideas on where we can incorporate it into Engage’s business model. I’d like to do a shout-out and congratulate the top 3 winners overall, and I would like to thank the sponsors of the event. After having such a good time, this definitely won’t be my last Hackathon.
