#hackerleague

Mashery representatives Sarah-Jane Morris and Rex St. John were on site at the San Mateo County Event Center to help support the Onramp 2014 connected car hackathon sponsored by Toyota. Hosted on Hacker League, the Onramp 2014 event was organized to showcase Toyota's new technology: CAN Gateway-ECU.

What is CAN Gateway-ECU? CAN stands for "Controller Area Bus" and "ECU" stands for "Electronic Control Unit." Most vehicles sold on the market currently use the CAN protocol to relay vehicle information between micro-controllers installed inside the vehicle itself. With CAN Gateway-ECU, developers can tap into a wealth of vehicle signals including fuel consumption, oil temperature, acceleration, braking and much more via the Bluetooth protocol. In short, there is tremendous untapped potential to build innovative software applications, and that is exactly what happened this weekend!

Registration started off at 9am Saturday, December 6th. Drawn by the possibilities of using vehicle data to build interesting projects, developers claimed their table-spaces and began familiarizing themselves with the CAN Gateway-ECU technology documentation.

One team, Sky Crew, with members Ramin Firoozye and Tim Burks, brought several Intel Edison devices and used them to connect with data sources and relay vehicle information to a back-end built with Google App Engine. 

Team Eye in the Sky brought along an impressive array of hardware including several drones. A "super-team," they occupied multiple tables and worked towards implementing a drone-based tracking system for connected cars using the data from CAN Gateway-ECU.

One of the highlights of Onramp 2014 is that Toyota provided teams with access to 6 FR-S street racers which developers could drive while testing their paired mobile applications.  Throughout the weekend, teams could be seen heading out to the parking lot to screech tires and engaging in tactical maneuvering around a nest of orange cones.

Nanami Tsukamoto, a noted Japanese race car driver, was invited to the event by Kyosho, who specialize in RC car technology. Kyosho provided developers with a very interesting piece of hardware which allows users to steer and drive RC cars using the controls of an actual car.  

Teams crunched through Saturday night to deliver on their (often ambitious) projects by Sunday morning. With a $10,000 grand prize as well as three prizes for sub-categories including Fun, Efficiency and Safety, participants were eager to deliver competitive results. On Sunday morning, the local media arrived en masse to view the innovations. 

After a round of demos, careful note-taking and question-asking, the judges excused themselves to determine which teams would proceed to the final rounds and their eligibility for the grand prize itself.

The audience convened in the auditorium to view demos from the finalists.

Team Eye in the Sky with members Nathan Schuett, David Witt, Steven Hung, Ben Sebby, Sho Hiruta and Hakuei Huang earned the top prize for their work on teaching drones to follow Scion FR-S cars as they race and drift around a race track using a live feed from the vehicle's GPS. 

The winners of the three category prizes were as follows. The "Fun" prize was won by team Interactive86, consisting of Zhichao Wang, Man Fai Kan and Barney Hsiao. The "Efficiency" prize was won by team RACEme with members Jeff Nucum and Aaron Abajian. Finally, the "Safety" award went to team AWARE with members Ray Cervantes, Jayanth Jumar Voruganti, Jesus Cagide, JR Alaoui and Emna Ghariani.

Mashery evangelists Amit Jotwani and Rex St John were on site at this year's Fall HackRU (powered by Hacker League) for a lively 24-hour hackathon with #inteliot Edison devices. Here are a few of the highlights.

Here's Reggie on the far right with our awesome NYC crew!

The following is a guest post from Reggie Montilus, who interned with Mashery over the summer of 2014, and made valuable contributions to Hacker League.

As a serial hackathon attendee, Hacker League is a tool I had become accustomed to encountering at each event I went to. A really great way for organizers to keep track of what’s getting built at hackathons, and for the developers to catalog their hacks in one central place. 

Fast forward to Summer 2014, when I began my internship hunt, and through a series of connections I heard that Mashery was hiring a Ruby developer for an intern position. I hopped at the chance because I would not only get an internship, which was my main goal at time, but I would also be working in my language of choice and would gain some production Ruby experience during my stay.

When I was told that I would be working on Hacker League, I was thrilled. I would be spending my summer working on the site that I’ve used numerous amount of times at hackathons. It was exciting, because as a developer,I wanted to work somewhere where I could make a difference, and I saw this as an opportunity to not only work on a meaningful project, but a chance to smooth some of the kinks that I’d personally experienced with Hacker League. This motivated me to give my all to the interviewing process, because more than anything I wanted to make a footprint during the summer that I would be proud to claim, and my work paid off.

Working on Hacker League was a tremendous challenge! During the duration of the internship, I went from having first day internal terror when looking at the confusing source code, to knowing it like I’d been working on it for years.

Hacker League was a site built by hackers for hackers, and I wanted it to be something hackers could be proud of. I made it a goal to be vocal during brainstorming meetings so that I could give some direct user feedback to the people that would able to put changes into motion. My main goal was to help ease the kinks and bring Hacker League to a level where it would be a staple at hackathons.

The site needed to look new, feel new, and feel like the same passion that drives hackathon goers was put into its development. Hacker League worked, it never stopped working, but it needed to be more than that. Luckily I was surrounded by people who were just as passionate about the product as I was, and countless time was spent bouncing ideas off of each other on how the site could improve. 

I began pushing changes almost immediately, tackling many user requests like video embedding and allowing Bitbucket connection alongside Github. Eventually the changes that needed to be made couldn’t be boiled down to simple tweaks to the functionality. We began to evolve the site internally, and I was lucky enough to be at the center of all of it. This process allowed me to gain experience in a large variety of software development areas. I was writing integration and feature tests, aiding in migrating the entire HTML and CSS of the site to a more stable framework, and even helping to migrate the ERB templates to HAML, all while still writing features to be implemented into the site in Ruby. This allowed me to learn all facets of the site and grow as more than just a Ruby/Rails developer.

There is something scary about taking a site and breaking it down and rebuilding it anew. As changes were made and styles were changed I started to notice how much different the new Hacker League is from the one in production, I also started to notice how much more I enjoyed the new Hacker League. Hacker League has always been a site that understood its audience and took pride in them, and this new site celebrates that. 

Without spoiling too much I am proud to say that Hacker League has become something that has the same passion behind it as the community it is designed to serve. As a Hacker League user turned developer turning back to a user after today I can proudly say that Hacker League is something that I’m excited for and I’m sure it will bring some excitement to its users when the new changes go live. (editor’s update, they are now live!)

Lastly I would like to thank all of the members of the Intel Mashery Developer Platform Services team for this amazing opportunity. Although I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting most of you in person, our weekly meetings helped ease the transition from feeling like the new intern guy to someone who was really a part of the team. I’m grateful for giving me the opportunity to learn and contribute.

“Say no to everything, so you can say yes to the one thing.” ~ Richie Norton

With a product like Hacker League that’s loved and used everyday by developers, to hackathon organizers, to just plain hackathon enthusiasts, we’ve been taking a closer look at exactly what would really make the experience better for our Hacker League community.

With Swift’s help, we dug into the Hacker League infrastructure, explored its nooks and crannies, and mapped out what we need to do in the next few months to improve the performance and user experience.

But what’s really cool is that we’ve pulled together some amazing talent to get to work on Hacker League. Today, I would like to share some of the things that we’ve been working on.

Here’s what we’ve been up to

The message we heard loud and clear from the community back when we took over Hacker League was - “Hacker League is awesome; don’t screw it up with a million unnecessary features.” So instead of adding unnecessary features, we’ve spent most of our time simplifying the existing features and improving the usability.

Make the Hackathons page load faster: We’ve rolled out a faster & improved performance of the Hackathons list page, making it easier to quickly find the hackathon you’re looking for.

Make it easier to add a Location to my hackathon: A new redesigned Address/Locaton selector for the “Create new Hackathon" page. It uses the Google Maps API to provide suggested Address, City, State, and Country Suggestions as you type, making it faster for you to create your hackathon and ensuring that the location is in a standard format, making it easier to search and discover.

Give me a Visual Map to help interested developers locate my hackathon: A Map with the chosen address plotted on it is then displayed, assuring organizers that users will be able to find directions using Google Maps.

Make it easier for me to sort/arrange the wiki pages for my hackathon: Ability to reorder/arrange the wiki links on the left side bar. The wiki links on the hackathon details page are now sorted alphabetically, instead of creation date. You can now control the order of the wiki pages simply by adding a page order number in front of the wiki name. This will ensure that they are arranged in the order you want, not the order you may have created them in.

Video embeds - The Hacker League wiki pages now support video embeds, so you can now include YouTube/Vimeo videos right into the wiki itself.

Help me make my hackathon pages look pretty: Introducing Hacker League Markdown Templates. Ready to be used Markdown templates for Overview, Schedule, Location & other popular pages you as an organizer might need to create for your hackathon. All available here on GitHub.

Add Support for BitBucket: You now have a choice to include a link to your GitHub or BitBucket repos on your user profile page.

I want to throw a private, internal hackathon: Hacker League Enterprise is now being used by Intel customers. General Electric used Hacker League Enterprise to run their recent in May at their GE Software headquarters in Northern California.

Plenty of bugs, annoyances, and enhancements (thanks to those of you who posted them on UserVoice)

What’s next

Among many requests we received from you, these two stood out pretty distinctly, and will be rolling out shortly -

Refresh the website design for Hacker League. Make it beautiful and more functional, without losing the simplicity.

Easily search for hackathons by name and location.

This is just a start. We plan to do a ton of work on Hacker League over the next few months. We’re also tapping the expertise of people across Mashery with skills in design, user experience, and front-end web interfaces. With their help, we’re going to build a better Hacker League.

We’re listening

We want to know what new features you’d like, what current features need tweaking, or whatever you’d like to share. If you have ideas, thoughts, suggestions, and requests, we’d be grateful if you’d put them into writing and drop us a note at feedback [at] hackerleague [dot] org, or tweet us at @hackerleague.

We will do our best to keep you well-informed, seek your feedback, and make Hacker League better than it was before. Stay tuned for what’s next, and please keep the feedback coming.

Amit Jotwani (@amit)

The following is a post by Swift, Founder of Hacker League

I’m excited to announce that Mashery, an Intel Company, has acquired the assets of Hacker League.

Just twenty-four short months ago, my co-founders and I built a prototype of Hacker League in a college dorm room and launched it with a single hackathon.  Since then, hackathon organizers in the US and abroad have listed and powered over 450 events on the platform creating a massive community of developers who now count on us to showcase their work every day.

Together, Abe Stanway, Ian Jennings, and I brought Hacker League a long way, and we couldn’t be more excited to watch Mashery bringing it to the next level. 

As the world’s leading API management provider, Mashery has demonstrated its commitment to the developer community from day one. Mashery evangelists participate in and organize 60+ hackathons each year, all over the world.  

I’ve been to many of those events and have had the distinct pleasure of witnessing their amazing work first hand. Mashery has a long history of investing in open source projects and community initiatives like I/O Docs and sample apps. Now they’re investing in Hacker League for the future of developers and hackathon organizers.

Mashery’s own developer community represents 235,000 developers who have retrieved API keys, and have more than 88,000 active applications in development or in production. Increasingly, those developers are looking to showcase their coding talent and API knowledge as they learn to create and prototype at hackathons.

I’ll be working closely with the Mashery team to make sure that the existing Hacker League developer community and hackathon organizers continue to get the best value out of Hacker League. You’ll be able to count on the same high quality experience you’ve come to expect and things will only continue to get better now that Hacker League has the commitment of an organization like Mashery behind it. I couldn’t be more excited for Hacker League’s future and I hope you are too.

Happy hacking,

An App in a Day!  Dressed to Code: Glamour’s Fashion Hackathon

This Saturday I attended my first hackathon at General Assembly hosted by Glamour Editor in Chief Cindi Leive and CEO of CFDA Steven Kolb. Teams were challenged to create a game/app/tool that engage fashionistas around shopping, street style, or sharing outfit ideas in 11 hours.

I worked with two developers and and an interactive designer to develop my concept “ShopBook.” Shopbook is as responsive web app that allows people to create a contact list of friends and family and their sizes, favorite brands, occasions/birthdays and wish lists.

^ What do they do?

Make it easier for hackathon organizers to register attendees, organize teams, and view submitted projects. Serve to inform about the event's schedule, sponsors, judges, featured APIs, rules, and more. Why are they special?

Aggregate resources around a specific hackathon in an simple, manageable format 

Participants can create profiles with their twitter and github accounts and save what they've worked on in the past

Encourage discovery of other hackathons

Are they funded? Bootstrapped Who are their comps? Hackathon.io, Hackatopia How do I find them? Website / Twitter  What else can you tell me? Got to know Swift and Abe during Hack'n Jill as they were helping participants with the platform. Quickly picking up awareness - they'll be running with TC's Disrupt in SF.