A few weekends ago, on March 5th, I held a hackathon at RPI. Hackathons are essentially all night coding sprees fueled by energy drinks and pizza. Facebook holds hackathons a few times a year, and a decent number of features, like video uploads, have come out of hackathons.
Having loved my first hackathon at Facebook back in October, I decided to bring the hackathon to the RPI community and see if anything awesome would come out of it.
Around 8pm Saturday night people began gathering for the Hackathon, and following a quick room change (our first room lacked power outlets), things got underway. By 9, we had close to 50 people hacking away on their various projects. The atmosphere was pretty awesome. We had some background music playing, a trippy video on the room’s projector, pizza and Red Bull in the middle of the room, and a sea of people at their laptops.
The hacking begins
I spent my first few hours making sure the pizza was flowing, people had what they needed, helping some of the teams out with their projects, and doing a little work on my own hack. I spent a decent amount of time recalling what I’d learned in Database Systems junior year by helping a team integrate PostreSQL with their C++ (eventually C) code. I also gave some design feedback for a club management system and chatted with a bunch of other teams to see how they were doing. The first few hours flew by.
By 1 or 2am, a few people had left because they either had stuff to do the next day or were getting tired. By 3am, I counted 33 people still hacking. 4 to 5am was the real test of endurance. That’s the hour where most people decide whether or not they’re going to stick it out and probably is the hour when people are at their most tired. I experienced it during my first hackathon, and I felt the zombie-like state of exhaustion come over me again. We lost about 10 people in that hour.
After that, everyone stuck through. People were, to steal a phrase from The Social Network, wired in as the sun began to rise. At 7, I decided to wind down the hacking so the remaining 15-20 hackers would have enough time to present their hacks.
We killed 14 Extra Large pies
There were a bunch of awesome hacks. Here’re the ones I managed to get links to:
- Universal Batch Converter - Johnny Dickinson. A program for converting between any image, audio, or document format extremely easy.
- Concert - Adam Georgiou, Colin Sullivan, and Amy Wieliczka. A collaborative audio organization web app.
- pLANer – Andrew Bradley and Brendan Ashby. A Rails LAN party management and scheduling system.
- Internetwork Management Program – Matt O’Brien. A tabbed telnet/ssh client written in Perl for managing connections to Cisco routers and switches.
- GeoMusic – Alvaro Graves. A Google Maps and Facebook mashup that shows where your favorite bands are from.
- 4grids – Henry Modisett and Daniel Henriques. A club management web app.
- Later – Me. A Chrome extension that makes it really easy to save and view videos, images, and websites later.
Hackathon: RPI was awesome. I want to hold another one in April, if I can find a good weekend. A lot of people told me that the hackathon was awesome, that they got a lot more work done than the normally would, and definitely would want to go to another hackathon. It was pretty awesome to hear people’s reactions to the hackathon. In fact, it seem kind of stupid not hold another one soon.
The survivors of Hackathon: RPI
Thanks to Chris Coonrad in the CS department for handling logistics, Kyle Maggy for hooking us up with a ton of Red Bull, and to everyone who showed up and made Hackathon: RPI awesome!
