#comedyhackday

Hey, all!

So a few months ago, I went to NYC to participate in an event called Comedy Hack Day. It's a weekend-long hackathon based around creating a live event that is one part tech presentation and one part comedy show. Over the last few months, I've worked with the team at Cultivated Wit (the creators) and a local team of designers and comedians to arrange our own first CHD here in DC.

Right now, we're looking for applications for people that want to participate. So designers, developers, comedians, and anyone in between that would be interested in making websites and apps that are funny and functional, you should apply now! The deadline is a few days away.

Comedy Hack Day returned to San Francisco bringing together developers, comedians and the local community for a weekend hackathon full of laughs and innovation.  This marks Cultivated Wit's fifth inception of the event also known as Comedy Hack Day Five.

The opening ceremonies took place last Friday night at Parisoma coworking spaces, and was the location for the two days of hacking.

Cultivated Wit’s Baritunde Thurston and Craig Cannon kicked off the festivities and hilariously announced the event’s details.  This was my first Comedy Hack Day and when I entered the stage to demo the Intel Mashery API Network, I transformed myself into the comedic spirit of the event. I requested all participants to stand and join me to demonstrate their "most ridiculous dance."   It was quite a spectacle. 

Craig then presented a video of the previous Comedy Hack Day winners “Timesify” which turns users most embarrassing sites into the look of the New York Times preventing shame.  The prize for the Wackiest Use of the Intel Mashery API Network: Up to (3) Flux Capacitor USB Car Chargers, up to (3) 4-packs of Oatmeal posters, and up to (5) Basis Health Tracker Watches.  Prepitches began, teams formed, and hacking commenced shortly after.  Sarah-Jane Morris joined me in promoting our Intel Mashery technologies, distributing Intel Edison development boards and meeting the wonderful participants. 

Teams worked continuously and some stayed overnight, and I did my best to stay up with them, helping them discover Intel's XDK, Edison and Mashery API Network.

Teams had until Saturday afternoon to submit their app descriptions to Hacker League.  I got the opportunity to demonstrate the new Hacker League features through directing volunteer Blake, who formed his team live on stage for the audience to follow.

Once teams submitted their projects, the first round of team demonstrations began.  Presentations incorporated a funny an innovative element. 

Participant Yosun excited the crowd with her Intel Edison controlled Cultivated Pocket Bot, a virtual robot with the ability to recognize people and speak about them poetically.

The top eight teams qualified to compete at the Comedy Hack Day Finals at the Brava Theater Sunday night, where I was joined by my Mashery teammates Sarah-Jane Morris and Vivek Chopra.

The five member team “I’m A Huge Fan” won the Mashery prize using the Beats Music and Rotten Tomatoes APIs.  This app allows users to get talking points about music, movies, and more so one can confidently join a conversation about something they know nothing about.

Comedy Hack Day winners “AwwCog” an Open Furby Platform allows users to carry out Python scripts with vocal cues when programming the furry Furby.  This allows people the ability to have engaging conversations with Furby and ask it questions about movies (this team used the Rotten Tomatoes API) and more. 

I want to thank Craig Cannon, Baratunde Thurston, Brian Janosch and the entire Comedy Hack Day team and volunteers for organizing this fun, hilarious, and awesome event.

Holy cow. I am excited and horrified to announce I have been invited to be one of the comedians at this year's Comedy Hack Day! The geniuses at Cultivated Wit have been organizing this amazing event for years and this one looks like it will be the best yet. And YOU can be there! The judges alone are worth the trip: Sasheer Zamata of SNL, Alexis Ohanian of Reddit, Amanda Peyton of Etsy, and Reggie Watts of Comedy Bang! Bang! and Jash. Get tickets, dum-dum!

Public demos on Sunday, June 15th - Doors at 6pm, show from 7-9

What’s funnier than a bunch of developers at a hackathon? It could just be a musical toilet, a hack seen recently at Cultivated Wit’s Comedy Hack Day! Pitches and demos had the audience laughing themselves out of their seats, and I had the privilege of being there for every hilarity-filled minute of it.

The star of the show!

Comedy Hack Day kicked off with a great introduction by Cultivated Wit’s own Baratunde Thurston, who set a humorous tone right at the start! It only got better from there, with great pitches by comedians and developers alike. When presenters weren’t being drowned out by the laughter of the audience, we could hear pitches like “Nobot,” a robot/app that can understand what you’re asking, but will always reply, “No,” or “Did Someone Die Here?” which will tell a user whether a person has died at their current location with answers like “Yes” and “Maybe.” These were two among dozens of hilarious pitches.

Baratunde's getting us kicked off at MIT's awesome Media Lab!

Mashery's banner is all set up and ready to go in the hacking space!

MIT’s Media lab proved to be a great venue in terms of both workspace and performance. Hackers stayed late into the night, sprawled out on couches or working in comfortable booths. By the submission deadline 12 projects had been submitted, not bad for a ~50 people hackathon! Demos went off without a hitch and again had the audience and judges rolling in the aisles!

Sweet work space!

Some notable hacks include:

Real Puppy: A virtual dog that is designed to teach children “the most important lesson of all” by dying no matter what.

FatBit: An app that encourages laziness and poor eating habits as a direct parody of fitbit and other health trackers on the market recently.

Pizzicato Privy: The aforementioned toilet that will turn any bathroom break into a musical experience.

And these hacks are just a few among many! Find them online at HackerLeague!

One of my personal favorites, Truth for Humanity, ended up taking home the grand prize! Truth for Humanity is a website that will take any word or phrase as input and generate a site fit for the ultimate conspiracy theorist. Try inputting a word and see what the world is keeping secret from you!

  Second place went to Sly Sound, a super neat app that lets you identify music like Shazam, but makes it look like you’re checking your twitter feed. Dubbed as “Shazam for Hipsters,” Sly sound won’t ever let your friends know you’re not more knowledgeable than them about obscure music ever again!

The Mashery Prize, all seasons of The Big Bang Theory and Seinfeld, went to team Boredom Buster, for making an app that utilized sensors on a glove to tell when a person is bored, and take active, and sometimes dramatic, measure to liven up a situation. A great demo included a data extraction team and a confetti gun to liven up the final hours of Comedy Hack Day. Congrats Travis, Elliott, and Matt!

Least Viable product went to Breaker Bot, a robot that’s exactly like Makerbot, except it, you know, breaks things. Breaker bot will hammer, blender, or electrocute anything that’s asking for it! Good job on making something that will never work (but was hilarious all the same!).

Comedy Hack Day was a riot and had me laughing out of my seat all weekend. Stay tuned for the next one! 

Carol Burnett once said, "Comedy is tragedy plus time." But when you're short on time, you make the most of what you have -- and if what you have is a room full of comedians, developers, and developers that think they're comedians, you get heaps of comedy in short order. This last weekend at Twitter's HQ in San Francisco, Mashery partook in Comedy Hack Day, the brainchild of Cultivated Wit, a creative firm with founders who all previously worked together at The Onion. This hackathon wasn't about solving serious pressing issues nor competing for gargantuan prizes (though there were some good ones). The mission was to build something that was fun and entertaining, while having a blast in the process. If you're skeptical about spending a weekend building silly software, you're not alone. So was I. However, the very premise of having a developer event focused on comedy was infectious from start to finish. It was hilarious and lighthearted, which sparked comedic camaraderie that resulted in amazing creativity.

The Hackathon Venue - Twitter HQ Twitter is located just down the street from Mashery. They were kind of enough to lend their space to us for the weekend (even staying open overnight), and I'd be hard pressed to find a better venue in San Francisco for any type of developer event. The primary hacking space was the cafeteria, which was expansive and included four large projector screens (perfect for demos). The walk-out roof-top patio (size just short of a football field) lent great views of the city, and was a nice way to get fresh air without leaving the building. The event kicked off on Saturday morning (April 7), and ran overnight through Sunday. Making Fun from Code and APIs At the start of the event, all of the platform API sponsors were welcomed up on stage to introduce their technology, intending to inspire developers as they came up with app ideas. At first I struggled with deciding which Mashery Network APIs were relevant to comedy -- and it dawned on me that both social media and traditional media would fit quite well. Shortly after the API demos were given by the platform sponsors, the emcee, Baratunde Thurston (@baratunde) invited everyone to line up and pitch their application ideas. Nearly half of the entire crowd stood and lined up. And that was when the comedy officially kicked off.

Stand Up Comedy, In the Form of Hack Pitches At a hackathon, it's typical to get 10 or 15 brave souls up on stage to share their ideas. At Comedy Hack Day, about 30 lined up.. and nearly every person presented multiple ideas. A few comedians turned the idea pitching session into improv. Ideas covered the entire spectrum, from hilarious, offensive, absurd, to incredibly awesome. Over 70 ideas were presented, and all of them (as well as some late entries) can be found here. You can also watch some of the idea pitches on YouTube.

Even the Judges Were Funny The deadline for development was 12:30 PM on Sunday (April 8). The teams were fed, and given a couple of hours to shape and massage their demos that they'd be giving in front of a packed house and judging panel. The panel was loaded with personalities who not only gave their time, but also their full attention and sense of humor.

DJ Patil (@dpatil) - Chief Data Scientist at Greylock

W Kamau Bell (@wkamaubell) - Bay Area comedian, has a show on FX called Totally Biased

Shanti Charan (@ShantiCharan)- Named "Stand-Up on the Way Up" by SF Weekly 

Mike Winter - Builds robots at Robot 11

Shannon Spanhake (@shannonspanhake) - Deputy Information Officer for the Mayor's Office (San Francisco)

The Notable, Hilarious Hacks I dare say that every single app pitched on stage was at least entertaining, of which there were 17. Here a few that stood out:

Up In A Gif by Ricky Robinett (@rickyrobinett) - I first met Ricky last year at a hackathon in New York (where he's from). He's an engineer and API lead at Ordr.in. He's one of many folks who flew in just for Comedy Hack Day SF. His app is a twist on the alarm clock. First, the snooze button is dynamically placed on your screen sot hat you cannot use muscle memory to grab your phone and blindly hit snooze. Second, when you hit snooze, the camera will take a series of pictures, create an animated GIF from the sequence of photos, and upload them to Twitter. An app that acts as a snooze deterrent, using public shaming and humor as the lever. Ricky used the Rdio API to incorporate music into the alarm clock. Video rough cut of his demo here.

Zombie Roulette by Angel Inokon (@angelinokon) - Angel is not a developer. She is a product manager and designer that has a vision of building an app to break the world record for the largest coordinated Thriller (Michael Jackson) dance, ever. She's aiming for 1,000,000 worldwide to do the dance on Oct 31, 2013, and she is building the app to pull this off. Zombie Roulette helps individuals learn the dance moves, share practice/progress videos with others, organize meetups, and coordinate the masses to pull off this big challenge. Angel is planning to incorporate fund raising for good cause into the program as well. She scored big points with the hackathon judge that works in SF city hall, and managed to win the "Least Viable Product" award (comprised of a GitHub membership, some MailChimp credits, and a Leo Leporte signed bottle of very fancy single malt whisky). Angel used the Viddy API  to build her prototype app.Video rough cut of her demo here.

Magic Story Factory by Brian Fountain (@fountain) and Toby Muresianu (@tobymuresianu) - What a team these guys made. Brian is a comedy writer and iOS developer. Toby is a comedy writer and developer. They were destined to build something awesome, and they delivered. They built a native iOS iPad app that allows parents to read the stories they want to read (e.g. headline news, sports news, etc.) by mashing up the news content into a storybook template, complete with children's' illustrations and animations). Their app was selected by Mashery for the Most Ridiculous Use of a Mashery API. Speaking of which, they used two -- USA TODAY API for headline news, and ESPN API for sports news. Video rough cut of their demo here.

Citation Needed by the Stanford Flipside crew, including Zach Galant, Jeremy Keeshin, Conor Doherty, Akiko Kozato, Matt LaVan, Rahul Prabala, Lcas Hanson, Anush Skukla and Courbin Foucart. In retrospect, this was a small army of developers that should have shipped nothing less than a polished revenue generating business ready to launch. They did win the grand prize  -- MailChimp "Super Awesome Way-Better-Than-Everybody-Else" award. Their app allows you to create very credible looking doctored Wikipedia entires. So, for instance, if you wanted to insert a false fact such as "Barack Obama was born in Canada on February 29, 1960" you would launch their app, select Barack Obama as the WIkipedia subject, type in your made-up fact, and the app would render Wikipedia on your movie device incorporating your new fact. The app is perfect for winning arguments without ever having to be right. They incorporated the Wikipedia and Twilio APIs. Watch their demo here (produced in HD).

Team: Citation Needed

Yours truly and Angel Inokon, creator of Zombie Roulette:

It's a Wrap This event epitomized synergy -- mashing up hackathons and humor, that delivered a whole far greater than the sum of the parts. Our team had a fantastic time at this event. We would like to thank the organizers, Cultivated Wit (@cultivatedwit) - Baratunde Thurston (@baratunde), Brian Janosch (@bjanosch) and Craig Cannon (@craigrcannon). Also thank you to our fellow sponsors: MailChimp, Funny or Die, SoundCloud, 10gen, Tapestry, tokbox, Rdio, GitHub, Twilio, Stride (gum) and Bowens.