Hack U Washington 2010

Publication
Dec 31, 1969
Abstract

We just wrapped up another great Hack U™ at the University of Washington. It started off on Tuesday with a kickoff talk by Paul Tarjan, then a whirlwind through JavaScript: The Good Parts given by Douglas Crockford, ending with a YUI3, YAP and Metro overview by Eric Miraglia and Reid Burke. Then the 24 hour hack session started... A record number of students stayed up ALL NIGHT with an amazing amount of energy and buzz. There were an impressive number of innovative hacks, including a craigslist rideshare finder, a multi-source news aggregator, a zen lense into Yahoo Answers and twitter, and a structured view into craigslist housing posts. And the 2010 UW HackU winners are:
  • 1st place: Regex Battle - The defending champions take the win again with an asteriod's like-game where the goal is to build a given regular expression by shooting flying characters. Websockets + SVG + self-recorded sound effects == awesome.
  • 2nd place: GeoCrier - Ultra-local citizen based news with a super cool API. Finally, a way to find out what is going on very close to home.
  • 3rd place - dayt: Automatically picks movies, restaurants, and events to do. And it has weather!
  • Honorable Mention: TabPurse - A nice way to keep all your tabs in a session alive. Either between computers, or between crashes.
  • Thinking Outside-the-DOM: The Internet Game - Have you ever wanted to shoot the unicode snowman? and/or your exs on facebook? Now you can with this bookmarklet that lets you play asteroids with DOM elements.
  • Recognition - Data-mining: Zeitgeist - A graphical display of USA's emotional state based on tweets and the Emote API

For media junkies, you can see videos of all the presentations and Eric's, Reid's and Paul's pictures. Special thanks to Professor Marty Stepp, Kim Todd and the whole ACM crew for organizing everything and being fantastic hosts! And of course huge props to all of the hackers who battled exhaustion and coded, debugged, juggled, laughed, ate, sang and drank their way through the night. We had a blast! Looking forward to storming Georgia Tech next week! Paul Tarjan and Jamie Lockwood Hack Wizard and Hack Mom

More information at:
Yahoo Developer Network

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