January 2013
12 posts
2 tags
The Photobooth
It’s the quirky stuff that makes hackathons really special. PennApps 2013 Spring featured a photobooth, sponsored by Github.
You can check out some of the photos submitted by hackers on our Facebook page.
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Who's Hacking What: The Musical Toilet
Alex and Kyle are having a pee problem.
“Dude,” Kyle says. “It is impossible to see this.” He squints at the screen, which is displaying a feed of images from a webcam hooked up above a yellow toilet. The toilet is sitting next to the desk.
“I really think we need the green toilet,” Alex says.
“Okay,” Kyle agrees. “Let’s use the...
1 tag
The Ducks
I’m talking to Isaac Sukin, a member of the Dorm Room Fund’s investment team, about the ducks.
These are not your average rubber ducks. These ducks are messengers—hackers at PennApps can use them to send each other superlatives.
The ducks were Isaac’s idea.
“Our main goal was to raise awareness [of the Dorm Room Fund],” he says. First Round Capital...
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Who's Hacking What: Merge
As soon as Team Merge started describing their solution to a common problem, a hacker from the next table over interjected.
“It’s like the worst problem in the history of the world, ever,” he said, smiling. He was mostly joking, but he had a point—Max, one of the hackers from Merge, was describing a problem that almost every college student can relate to.
“When I...
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Food@PennApps: Gourmet Popsicles
One of the most popular PennApps foods is rapidly becoming a tradition. Popsicles first appeared during a warmer weather PennApps, but even in January, gourmet popsicles can get even the most serious hackers to step away from their screens.
We had some amazing flavors this year: Spiced Apple Cider, Vietnamese Iced Coffee, and Mango-something-or-another.
Post by @temiri. Photos by...
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Who's Hacking What: Stumblr
“Stumbler? Is that with an ‘e?’” I ask.
“No,” Sam clarifies. “It’s like ‘Tumblr.’ It’s actually like StumbleUpon, but with Tumblr content.”
The inspiration, Sam says, struck when he was talking to a friend who really likes both StumbleUpon and Tumblr. When that friend started wishing for a mashup of the two, Sam knew he...
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Who's Hacking What: Hamilton
“It’s a graph theory graph thing!” Sri says. “No,” Adam says. “It’s a draggy javascript canvas editable svg graph visualization doohickey for mackey idolizers.” (This, I learn, is what they’ve written for their github repo.)
I’m still confused, so Sri explains. “When we do stuff with graph theory,” he says, “we want...
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The Ears
“I’ve heard a lot about your ears,” I say. This is true. I have heard a lot about the ears—but I wanted to hear it from Song himself. Song Zheng is a dev evangelist for Tokbox, and he got everyone at PennApps talking when he went on stage with four ears: his own, and another pair on top of his head. This wouldn’t be so unusual, but these ears move. On their own....
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Who's Hacking What: "RCPRS"
“We’re building a RCPRS,” one of the hackers said. “A what?” I ask. “Oh, you know. An RCPRS. A realtime, collaborative playlist request system.” Oh, of course.
“So say you’re having a party,” someone explained. “You can then give everyone a link, and they can go to that link and submit playlist requests and vote on...
Highlights from the PennApps API Demos
In 2013, it’s official: PennApps is the largest university hackathon in the world, ever. We had a pretty full house, even in Penn’s 1,000-person Irvine Auditorium.
But it’s not only big. It’s shaping up to be extremely high caliber, too, and the bar was set with some truly terrific API demos.
Here are a few highlights.
Cory Levy, of One, gives a...
Massages on Saturday(2-4 p.m.)
We are having massages tomorrow! Please fill out the form get a chance at having one. http://bit.ly/10Gr1f3
1 tag
September 2012
11 posts
PennApps Winners
Sorry for the delay, folks! The list of all winners is below (you can see the list of projects here, what the prizes actually are here, and videos of the demos are up on Youtube)!
Main Prizes
Grand Prize: Java Auto Music [video]
Second Place: Snap Site [video]
Third place: Passwarp [video]
The Outsiders [top non-Penn team]: PayTango [video]
Organizers Choice: lpControl [video]
Sponsored...
Final Mandatory Practice Logistics
1) HackerLeague
First things first, if you have not registered for HackerLeague, please do so immediately.
2) Practice Demoing in Hall of Flags
Everyone is required to a practice run through in the Hall of Flags in Houston Hall (where the initial kickoff event was—here’s a map). You will all practice demoing in the same order as the real thing.
[ Here is the SignUp Form ] (this is...
Submission and final logistics
Just a sense of what the rest of today is looking like:
At noon, hacking will stop. We will be locking submissions to HackerLeague at that time, so you must submit by then. Make sure to note Lunch will be served at noon as well. Around 1230, we will start moving to Houston Hall. Teams will need to check their hardware, etc, to make sure their setup is working.
The demo session will start at 2. A...
Submitting your Hack
We are using HackerLeague for app submission. By noon tomorrow, you must have clicked “Submit Your Project for Judging” if you want to demo. Note that you must also list your APIs if you want to be eligible for the respective API prizes. Please have all team members join your team if possible!
Important Links
There are a lot of links to keep track of PennApps - here are all of them in one place.
API descriptions are up at git.to/api12f
Mentor information are up at git.to/mentor12f
The Piazza (for asking questions to our mentors and others) is at git.to/piazza12f
The list of prizes is up at git.to/prizes12f
We will add more links here as they come up!
Prizes!
We’re excited to be giving out over $15,000 in prizes this weekend! This list will be updated as our sponsors update us on any other prizes they’ll be distributing, but you can see details for all prizes here.
Main Prizes
Grand Prize: $4000 + a trip to the Google NYC office to demo your office to Google Engineers, a paid trip to the Facebook College Hackathon Finals, and automatic...
Program Information
All PennApps participants will be receiving a program with lots of information for the weekend, including schedule, maps, prizes, and more! The program can be found online here.
Available APIs
Many of our sponsors are presenting their APIs today for you to utilize during your hack!
The APIs/technologies being presented are: Cloudmine, Dropbox Facebook, Filepicker, Goldman Sachs, ikanow, MailChimp, Mashery, Microsoft, MongoDB, Mozilla, New York Times, SendGrid, Tumblr, Twilio, Twitter, Venmo, Zappos.
A description of APIs is at git.to/api12f.
Final Day Logistics
This email went out last night to all participants:
Hey everyone! I hope you’re excited for PennApps tomorrow because we definitely are! We have a lot of information, so please read this entire email! By the way, if you have any questions, we will all be checking our email all day tomorrow.
[[MORE]]
We will have updates and information over the course of the day on our Twitter and Tumblr....
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PennApps Tech Talks & Team Formation
The Dining Philosophers is organizing a week full of tech talks in preparation for PennApps. Whether you are a beginner or more advanced, and even if you’re not participating in PennApps, everyone is invited to come have fun and learn something new. We’ve listed “pre-reqs” to help you gauge the difficulty level.
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Monday (9/10)
PennApps Team Formation [RSVP] ...
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Register for PennApps Fall 2012 →
Registration for our Fall 2012 event has officially been opened. Go and sign up while tickets last! We look forward to hosting you at Penn for the weekend of September 14-16. Want to learn more before you register? Find more details on our website.
