The Inaugural Anideo Hackathon

14 Jan 2012 – Singapore

AJ’s been floating the idea of a regularly scheduled hackathon at Anideo for a few months now. He believes (and I concur) that we need a break from our own product building to do something outside our collective zones of comfort.

We finally got off our butts and managed to put one together last week. We wanted to hold it at our office and we weren’t sure what the response would be like and we didn’t want to risk overcrowding our cosy little space, so we invited a few friends over, got some pizza, stocked up on Red Bull and stayed from 7pm on a Thursday to 5am the next morning.

It was great fun to take off our minds off work and do something different, and it was great to talk to friends about pure tech stuff without the startup bullshit that has taken over our lives – more on that later.

We successfuly completed the hackathon and are proud to report on some of the projects that came up during the event:

KNPathTableViewController

Kent has been taking care of our mobile needs very ably for the last few months and has been generating stellar work week over week. We’ve all ogled at Path’s new beautiful interface and Kent took it on himself to do a version of the scrolling clock which appears whenever you scroll down your Path timeline. The result of his work is here, free for anyone to use.

underscore.cocoa

Peter‘s been making great contributions to the Cocoa BDD community over the last few weeks with Specta as well as Expecta, but his work during the hackathon consisted of porting underscore.js to Cocoa. You can track his progress on GitHub here. I still haven’t started doing BDD on Cocoa (in fact I haven’t done Cocoa programming in a while) but Peter’s set of great tools will enable me to cross the chasm.

LazyPost

This is still a working name but AJ came up with an idea that involves location and postcards. It’s a nifty little app and we’ll give you more details once its ready to ship (which is hopefully very soon).

proxee.io

I personally worked on proxee.io – I want a better web debugging proxy to test out iOS app APIs. My current solution is to use Charles which is both a Java app as well as quite expensive, hence my need for proxee.io.

Zhenyi helped with the design of the app and my arguments with Choon Keat over the need for a local proxy vs a hosted one, helped sharpen my reasonings for making it. Choon Keat is in fact working on a hosted proxy which lets you rewrite responses to a server/client based on a set of rules and lets you record traces of API calls, which can be shared with others.

I don’t think I’ve convinced him yet of the need for my take on a proxy, but hopefully once it’s live! ;)

Lessons

I personally enjoyed the camaraderie and the arguing a lot and enjoyed working on a completely different problem than my “day job”. We need to work harder on maybe making sure that people collaborate more during the hackathons, but it was definitely a good first step.

Here’s to many more, so stay tuned!