Hackathon at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
HackNC a hackathon with over 200+ passionate hackers trying to have fun, chill, and build something cool. This is the 3rd hackathon I have been to, and so far I have never regret a single experience. Just starting a project from scratch and trying to get a high fidelity prototype working was tedious. But starting things at a hackathon, you get one of the most productive experiences of your life. HackNC is a little different from MHacks and PennApps, it was only for 24 hours. So this meant we had less time to work on our hack. It was just perfect going to HackNC because us Hokies (Virginia Tech) only live 3 hours away.
During the hackathon we built a hackathon application. We call it Hack.* . Essentially we are trying to create an open source mobile application that can be used by any high school, and any university trying to host their own hackathon. This will provide a seemingly easy and useful way to keep hackathon events in order, and meant less work, and more productivity. The way we came up with our name was really funny. We thought of Hackbook, HackAgenda, HackEasy, Hagenda, and many other weird names. Finally I was like, there needs to be a way to refer to every other school using our application and hence .* was born. This would refer to HackVT, HackNC, HackRU, and etc. I was doing mostly front-end work, where as my partner was doing the back-end. He was setting up the notifications with AWS SNS (Simple Notification Services), which was by the way insanely cool!
Some hackathons that we have been to has handed out paper brochures, and rely on tweeting events. With this open source mobile application you will be able to know with ease that anyone who has this application downloaded on his or her phone will get this push notification. Never again run around hallways, rooms screaming, "Food is here come grab it!” Also notification is useful for emergencies too! We are going to finish this open source project, and I hope that we provide a way to easily change assets so that, school could cater and customize it to their own needs. Below is a link to our Github repo. Keep in mind that we only had 24 hours to work on this, and some of the code is not cleaned up yet!