On August 16 and 17 iWeb participated in #HackMTL, a ‘hackathon’ event organized by MTLStartupTalent and held at the Montreal Olympic Stadium. The hackathon brought together more than a hundred developers from a wide variety of backgrounds for 24 hours of hacking in Javascript, creating single page applications, Chrome extensions and Node.js based systems, and even integrating it all with hardware. Here’s an account of the event for anyone who couldn’t attend, or is simply interested in understanding what a hackathon is. We also have details of the competition winners.
Friday
Friday began with presentations covering the uses of Javascript, frameworks and related topics. After a quick break for lots of pizza and beer, the participants took to the stage to pitch their ideas and attract other developers to join their projects. Teams varied in size from 2 to 4 developers, and some people even went solo. After that many teams went home or somewhere else to start coding their app through the night, before returning to the Olympic Stadium’s tower for a whole Saturday of hacking.
Saturday
One of the nice things about the event is that it was held at the top of the Montreal Olympic Stadium Tower, the tallest inclined tower in the world at 175 metres (574 ft)). From the tower we could see the whole city from morning until night, a really special treat. But besides occasional breaks for lunch and sightseeing, everybody was there to code.
iWeb donated 25 free dedicated servers with the Smart Layer to be used to host the participants’ applications during the event, and in total one third of the teams used them. No one using Node.js on the server side even considered using something else.
I showed people a quick recipe to have a Node.js up and running in 5 seconds. It’s not a production grade install, but it’s enough to get going. Here it is:
After that all you need to do is git clone your code, run “npm install” and “node my_app.js”. And that’s it. It’s a simple way to get started, and time is of the essence during hackatons!
I stayed at the event during Saturday talking with the teams and helping people out with server side questions, and I met a lot of nice people and had awesome conversations with the developers.
Cakemail, makers of a e-mail marketing tool for resellers based in Montreal, and the hosts of the JS-Montreal user group, also pitched in and offered private beta access to a new product they are developing that allows developers to send transactional e-mails even from client-side apps. It was really neat, and I’m looking forward for them to make it public. A big part of their infrastructure is hosted on iWeb’s Smart Servers. A part of their team was there too, coding along.
PasswordBox, another Montreal based company which offers safe password management tools, was the main sponsor of the event and Marc-Antoine Ross, their co-founder and CTO, was there helping people, sharing ideas, and looking for great talent. Marc-Antoine along with Cedric Dugas from Cakemail and Lauren McLeod from FlightFox, made up the panel of judges for the finished applications, which were presented around 6pm.
The winners
Most of the teams had something to show for the judges, and it was refreshing to see so many nice ideas becoming reality in such a small amount of time. The winners were:
Best Team: Jean-Philippe Caissy, Alexandre Rimthong and Louis-Bertrand Varin, with Crypto-Chrome.
Best Solo Developer: Marek Za?uski with BarCoder, barcode scanning using a webcam and Javascript
Best Security Project: Mohit Shah, Shabbir Hussain and Sujay Kathrotia with EasySec Suite
Best Google Chrome Extension: Michael Lakhia mapify.io, adding location to Kijiji
The winners got prizes offered by the sponsors: PasswordBox, iWeb and Google. Everybody did an awesome job coding and deploying their apps, while learning a lot while having a great time at the top of the world. It was fantastic.
You can read more and see some great pictures of the event on Montreal Tech Watch article about the event. Stay tuned for more hackatons!