Time for another round

This past weekend I ran a Pebble hackathon called Time for Another Round at the University of Ottawa and it was a huge success! We had developers from all over the city join us to work on developing some awesome Pebble hacks. We even had 2 amazing developers drive up from Detroit to join us! Overall there were about 30 people attending the hackathon which amounted to 12 teams.

Timeline

Saturday started off with a presentation by myself teaching the participants how to build 2 simple watchfaces based off of the Pebble examples: Concentricity and Strider. People were really pleased with the presentation and stated that it had really helped them get started! The rest of the day was spent creating apps and turning pop and snacks into code. We had a wonderful Subway lunch provided by Pebble.

The second day we let the developers work on their projects all day. In the afternoon developers had a chance to present their hacks and creations to the panel of judges. We had 2 guest judges join us fom the University of Ottawa: Professor Miguel Garzon and Professor Hussein Al Osman!

Me giving a Pebble Tutorial

Winners

Before I go into detail I must say that I was impressed with all of the participants’ creations! There were some really amazing ideas which came to life during this hackathon.

In first place was the team DetroitHackCity with members David and Rob! Their app Happy Hackathon was quite amazing, it made use of the new Health APIs to gamify hackathon fitness. It displayed the users’ health data in some beautifully displayed graphs. It also made use of the Timeline functionality to push hackathon notifications to you timeline, such as when food arrives. They were also working on a dashboard where you could track your steps in comparison to the other hackers. Well done DetroitHackCity!

DetroitHackCity receiving their Pebble Time Rounds

In second place was the team Bus Now with members Abdulwahaab and Filip! Their app Bus Now is the perfect app for any University of Ottawa student looking to catch the next bus in their area. It took the OCTranspo schedule for the nearest bus stop via GPS and displayed it in an easy to navigate menu. This will sure save me freezing my hands off in the middle of the winter when I need to check the bus schedule. Congratulations Bus Now!

Bus Now receiving their Pebble Times

In third place was the team Git Gud Sun with Remi and Alex. Git Gud Sun is committed to ensuring that you are up to date with your watched repositories on Github. The app enabled its users to associate their accounts via a Github API key and would retrieve all information about the users’ watched repositories. Now you can bring your work everywhere you go, even in the pool where your phone won’t survive! Great job Remi and Alex!

Git Gud Sun receiving their Pebble Steels

What’s Next?

I hope to run another Pebble hackathon in the future, I really enjoy organizing these events! Only time will tell when the next hackathon will occur but in the mean time our monthly Pebble Meetups will still be occurring, so if you’re in the Ottawa area be sure to come to one (or more)!

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