OpenSource Connections
Category: Uncategorized
Last Friday OpenSource Connections held one of our regular “hackathons”, where OSC developers get together for a day and work on a development project of our choosing, and then at the end of the day, present our work to each other. A hackathon is a fun event where we each get to explore some technology we are interested in, and see how far we can get in one day with it.
This time, we decided to mix up the way we do hackathons. We added in a theme, voting on the best project, celebrity judges, a gift certificate to Best Buy, and even a trophy! The usual elements of time pressure, creativity, fun, caffeine, and a beer at the end of the day were still present.
At the end of the day: Scott Stults was crowned the inaugural OSC “Code Ninja”. Congratulations Scott! In a moment I will describe a little more about the hackathon, but first, lets all sit back and enjoy this impressive photo of Scott with his prized trophy. Scott is making a feeble attempt to strike the same pose as the karate-guy on the trophy.
For the hackathon, we started the day by meeting at the Nook for breakfast. Then we headed over to a conference room at CitySpace where we set up camp for the day.
The theme of the hackathon was “time”, which meant that you could build any application you wanted, as long as there was some element of time in it. The app had to be built in the 7 or so hours of the hackathon, and judging began at 4:30pm. The applications were judged on three axes: Innovation, Business Utility/Usefulness, and Completeness. Each person voted on all the projects except for their own, giving 1-5 stars for each app on each of the three axes. The project with the highest total number of points was the winner.
To add another dynamic to the voting, we invited “celebrity judges” to join us at 4:30 and they had votes as well. Our celebrity judges were Glenn Wasson and Brian Wheeler. Glenn is an architect at SAIC, and is perhaps most famous for being one of the founders of “The Oracle of Bacon” website. Brian is famous for the Charlottesville Tomorrow website.
Both judges were excellent, and very gracious with their time since we kept them there until nearly 6pm on a Friday night. Thanks Glenn and Brian!
We had a variety of applications built. Caleb worked with Html5 to build a dynamic graph for tracking stocks. Michael worked on extending unit testing frameworks in Visual Studio. Eric built a website where you can send your server logs to, and it will stream out audio sounds that you can listen to which indicate what types of messages are being logged (errors, info, etc). Youssef and I teamed up to build a droid app and deploy it to my phone. We had some cool ideas, but ended up scaling them down to building an Agile standup meeting timer. It made my phone vibrate, which was of course extremely cool.
Despite that coolness, and despite a strong challenge from Eric, the inaugural code ninja is Scott! Scott didnt just win because he was the only one of us to prepare a powerpoint presentation about his app (that actually lost him a few votes Im guessing – yuk yuk), but because he made wikis exciting! Scott used SPARQL in Semantic Media Wiki SMW+ to show how we could track our projects at OSC and see timelines of who is working on what project.
Thanks to everybody for a great time – Im looking forward to the next hackathon! I understand that Scott has removed family photos in order to place the trophy in a place of honor at his home, and so I wish the next Code Ninja the best of luck in wresting it away from him.