Michael Carrano

TechCrunch Hackathon 2012

Published by Michael Carrano on May 23, 2012

I decided to participate in the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon for a second time this year. You can read about my first hackathon experience, which also happened to be a TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon.

Just like my first experience, I went to the hackathon with no game plan. I wanted to meet some awesome people and work on a cool project. This time around, I met three really intelligent students: Alex, Mikhail, and Blake who were still in high school.

Alex, Mikhail and Blake recently finished up a college tour in which there were many different seminars during the course of the tour. There were seminars that overlapped in time and they did not know how to decide which seminar to attend.

The problem we set out to solve was to help you decide which seminar to attend at a large conference. A large conference usually has multiple seminars at the same time and it is up to you to decide which one to attend. However, we wanted to factor in your friend’s decisions and the rest of the audiences input to help you make your choice.

The idea was to develop a web based application and Android application that will allow you to select which conference you are attending and which seminars within the conference you will be going to. You will then be able to see the schedule your friends selected and be able to edit your schedule to match if you would like.

I helped on the Android side of the development but unfortunately, we were not able to accomplish much of what we set out to do and I also ended up leaving early.

The hackathon was enjoyable in that I finally attended a few API workshops. I attended the Twilio workshop even though I have used their dead simple API in the past for TeachSMS. I also went to MetaLayer API workshop and they have a really cool API that I will use at some point in the future.

I do not know if it was the excitement of attending my first hackathon but this year the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon was not that exciting. First off, there seemed to be less people and sponsors this year. The food was rationed and was not even close to the same quality last year. For example, dinner was pizza and you were only allowed one slice at a time. The midnight snack was hot dogs but last year it was a chinese food buffet.

Needless to say I think the third time will be a charm so I look forward to the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon 2013.