Survivors

In a little less the 24 hours, over the course of Friday/Saturday, we created not 1 new applications, but two.

The Hack-a-Thon kicked off at 6’o-clock Friday evening at the Champlain Mill in Winooski Vermont. We had come in a few hours earlier to set up our equipment and sign in. We had a great little corner in what used to be an old retail store; back in the day the mill, used to be a mall.

Instead it found itself crammed with over 100 different developers, ranging from students from nearby Champlain, St. Mikes, and UVM, to professionals. Teams were as small as 1 and as large as five.

We came in with four valid ideas that we believed fit the initial criteria: Make an app that in some way is helpful to the Vermont community and utilizes at least 1 of the data sets. Earlier that week we had been given the data sets, and it was almost too much, we could basically use anything that was available to the public.

We deliberated for about an hour, narrowing our choice down to what we ultimately called BarterVT. Just like it sounds, BarterVT would allow Vermont residents to post what they had to trade as well as what they were interested in.

Utilizing google maps posters would appear as pins. Anyone could search by city to see all available bartering opportunities available to them. You can see the finished product HERE.

There was some risk in attempting this though:

1.  we had never done anything like it before


2. The Google Maps API is written in Java Script. :( which is no fun, Mike told me.

The other thing was that for this project, I was basically useless. My java script skills are rusty, and Mike had been poking at Google Maps earlier in the week, so he was the most qualified to try to tackle that part. Matt was creating our database and handling the website aspect of things, the portal where users could create listings. The PHP he wrote was what passed the information gathered over to Mike to be viewed with Google Maps. Marguerite was in charge of UI, which left me out.

So I started my own project.

I wanted to create something simple, a scrollable, dynamic array of images. In order to shoehorn the concept into helping Vermont I decided to learn how to do REST api calls in AS3, and created an application that plucked images that were tagged as Vermont from the Flickr photostream. And the best part is, is that it works!

So overall, a tired, yet successful weekend at the hack-a-ton.