Texas’ Top Collegiate Developers meet at the University of Texas at Austin for HackTX
HackTX featured Texas’ top collegiate developers at the University of Texas at Austin last weekend. This 24-hour hackathon attracted students from Texas A&M, UT Dallas, and more. The event took place at the university’s Student Activity Center occupying three floors for hacking.
On Saturday morning, students gathered at the center’s auditorium for the opening ceremonies. HackTX organizer Taylor Barnett kicked off the event and welcomed the over 500 participants.
It was great to see many familiar mentor faces including SendGrid’s Scott Motte.
MLH’s and HackTX emcee Swift introduced the API sponsors.
The Intel Mashery prize for the Best App Using the Mashery API Network: up to (3) Husan Quadcopters and up to (5) Basis health tracker watches.
Intel’s Steven Xing joined me in helping developers onboard with Intel Mashery technologies including the Intel Edison. Hacker League was used by HackTX to manage app submissions and judging setup (see all 105 projects here).
Participants made their way to the center’s ballroom which housed the sponsor tables and one of the many hacking spaces. Steven and I were met by many developers eager to learn and build with Mashery API Network, Intel Edison and XDK.
Late evening, MLH’s Jon Gottfried & Swift announced the cup stacking challenge. Developers left their hacking spaces momentarily to form teams in building the tallest stack of cups in just minutes.
The project expo started Sunday morning in the ballroom with 105 projects.
The Mashery prize was awarded to the four member team that created the alerting disease travelers’ app “Threat Wire.” They used the USA TODAY API to search news for disease related articles and analyzed this information for a threat level score. Users can then alert others of potential disease in a certain area through the apps messaging system managed by SendGrid and Context.IO
An Intel honorable mention went to the two member team that created “Binary Hero.” In this video game which used the Intel Edsion, a series of symbols descend on the screen and users tap a button to eliminate the symbols at a certain point and time.
The 1st place HackTX prize went to “uDTV.” This winning four member team controlled DIRECTV through the Pebble Watch and a mobile app they built with Intel XDK.
I want to thank Taylor Barnett and all the HackTX volunteers for helping organize this awesome event.















