NeoReach Hosted Hack Night in Orlando, FL
On March 1st our MEAN stack hack night in downtown Orlando turned out to be amazing! So many great apps were created in just 4 hours of hacking away. Everyone was given the same guidelines: use the MEAN stack, incorporate some kind of UX/UI component, and create an app that is actionable or a viable business.
A lot of apps used Github’s API. One of the apps, built by Chris McLean and John Li, translates GitHub account information into a format that a nontechnical person can understand and use for hiring purposes. Octocard, built by Jon Rutishauser, David Pate, and Logan Arnett also one of our competing groups. Built a search tool for users to look through any open source project on Github and view the leading contributors. The app also allows you to search for yourself by Github username and see a report card of your open source activity. We also saw an app that allows users to seamlessly view what is trending on GitHub.
Finally, there were a few entries that used Twitter as a base. One such app used Twitter as a voting platform using hashtag counts. Another was called “Social Sentiment Analyzer” based on 100 recent tweets for a particular hashtag on Twitter. The system would look for positive, neutral and negative word on each tweet and come up score ranging from -10 to 10.
How we judged: There was a point system set in place, max points were 20 and each category was worth 5 points each.
We had our CEO, Jesse Leimgruber reviews everyone on whether their app was a viable product or an actionable app. Our Director of Front End, Susie judge on their UX/UI creativity. Then our Head of Development Alan James, look over their code for how well they separated the front end and back end along with how they used the MEAN stack. The last category was on how well they solved the problem presented.
Now onto the prizes: The first place winning team each member would receive an Ipad Air 2. The second place team each would receive a pair of Bose Headphones.
So who won?
Our honorable mention is Team DiCaprio– Sergio Cruz, Tyler Petresky, Jeremy Privett: They created a real-time tool for tracking how people are feeling about a specific topic based on the sentiment of incoming tweets.
It was excruciatingly hard to decide who should get the first and second place. As you could expect to happen when you bring together many of Orlando’s finest hackers. The following two apps were a close tie and we love them both dearly.
The Second place winner is LinkedHub – Bruno Genaro, Ianko Leite, Filipe Perina, and Eduardo Damianik – A platform that fact checks a user’s LinkedIn self-proclaimed development skills using their GitHub activity.
Finally, our first place winner is Goatspresso – David Khorshid, Daniel Walker, Ian Thomas – Connecting users to their favorite coffee shops with easy to use ahead of time ordering and built-in arrival time monitoring. Ordering your favorite drink has never been so easy!
Thank you all for coming out for our first of many HackNights. We’ll see you soon 😉
