Hack-a-thon Part 2

On Saturday morning things got a little tense.

Matt took off at 11 the night before, marguerite left at midnight, I turned in at 1, and Mike was up until 3 in the morning. We came back in at 8 to pick up where we left off and quickly started to run into some problems.

When searching through the towns, just to view who was willing to barter, no matter how many results were stored in the database, we would only be able to view 1 of them. We ran in circles for hours trying to figure out this experience breaking bug. Even when the hack-a-thon finished the issue still persisted.

It wasn’t until the following Sunday morning Mike discovered that we had hit our limit of API calls that can be made to Google Maps within a 24 hour period…

So it was at 3 we sat down, a little defeated and frustrated at our application, to watch the other 30 groups present.

The best thing about these really tight time limits is that it there is always some really great ideas that find root. For instance: These guys created an app which allows any user to report a sighting of wildlife. The application takes in their location data and the current weather outside. This could potentially be used to track the migratory pattern of animals, or the spread of infestations, or even dangerous animal sightings. But this group went beyond that, they create their own API so that other developers could use this new dataset.

There was a downside to hackVT though, at least in my opinion. This year it was really well organized, tables had been laid out, teams were pre matched to their location, big money was at stake, and somehow it all felt wrong…

It was somehow just too slick.

For me, these kinds of experiences are like camping: you throw everything you might need in a car & go. If you leave something behind, you leave it behind and you figure out how to live without it.

HackVT didn’t feel like that, it had grown out of a grassroots livelihood and had become corporate and too big for its own shoes.