StudentHack

[studenthackblog-blog]

No Ticket? We have a waitlist!

Yesterday, we announced that our tickets have sold out at Launch in London. As the demand was so great and many of those interested had not been able to obtain a ticket, we'll be introducing a waiting list for those hackers.

Over the next 48 hours, we will email everyone with a ticket and asking them to confirm their attendance. You'll need to confirm within 48 hours else we will give your ticket to someone else on the waiting list.

Please do NOT sign up for the waiting list if you do not plan on honouring your place. There are hackers from international territories who need time to book their flights and we could also give these spots to other really passionate hackers.

We're building excitement as the weeks come up for the next StudentHack.

Bilawal and Syeef

[studenthackblog-blog]

Announcing free coaches to Manchester

Earlier last week, we announced an incredible new sponsorship deal with AutoTrader UK which puts them as the hosts for the next StudentHack at their Manchester HQ.

Today, we're making another incredible announcement: we are launching free return coaches to and from StudentHack.

Cities we will be commissioning routes from are Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, Durham, Nottingham, Oxford and London. They will take you directly to the StudentHack venue and return you home after the event.

We'll be the second student hackathon in the UK (after MLH Launch Hack) to offer it and it completely changes how easy it will be to come and hack with us throughout the entire year. This is big.

Existing ticket holders: If you already have a ticket to StudentHack Halloween, you can book your coach seat by clicking right now. We do require a refundable £10 deposit in order to reserve your seat.

Non-ticket holders: We are releasing more tickets today at 2pm. They are still free but now require no application so it's first-come-first-serve. You'll be able to book your coach seat immediately by clicking here after you have your ticket.

We will keep a close eye on coaches and may adjust the routes depending on the demand we see (or even add more coaches). We're so excited about this incredible announcement and massive thank you to AutoTrader UK (who we couldn't done any of this without!). #StudentHackCoaches

- Bilawal and Syeef, organisers

[studenthackblog-blog]

Welcoming our new venue

Since we started 2 years ago, we've been fortunate to call the incredible MMU Business School our home. This is where it all began for us and it's unreal how far we've come. I cannot say that without personally thanking Keith Miller, Darren Dancey and Ruth Ashford from MMU who all took a risk on StudentHack and my vision.

Unfortunately, we have outgrown the limitations of a university campus and needed more freedom/capacity in order to keep StudentHack fresh.

So... today is a new chapter in StudentHack's future.

We're proud to introduce you to AutoTrader HQ on First Street, Manchester as our official new venue. This consists of two massive floors of incredible workspaces, more venue capacity, a plentiful of rooms with large monitors, gaming and socials areas and insane other stuff.

The freedom we have to utilise this space allows us to test many our ideas from our experimental culture. And it is about 900 metres from our old venue - it is almost too perfect of a successor to the venue.

We're excited about the next chapter. #StudentHack

- Bilawal and Syeef

[studenthackblog-blog]

Announcing StudentHack: Halloween Edition

The hackathon scene has grown phenomenally in the UK since we started back in 2012. And on a global level, it's truly incredible. Hackers really have an incredible opportunity to truly shape and define the future we all live in.

And on that note, StudentHack is really excited to announce our next hackathon, StudentHack: Halloween Edition. This will be our third hackathon which will commence in Manchester, UK on the 31st Oct weekend.

We have always wanted to keep StudentHack fresh and that's exactly what we are committed to doing. Some of those changes you'll see right away:

Tickets for StudentHack are now completely free.

Limited venue space means we are giving tickets away by lottery.

We are now a three-day hackathon instead of two.

Also, the recent announcement of Major League Hacking UK means we're closer than ever to the American student hackathon scene. You'll be able to collect points for your school at participating hackathons - including StudentHack - to compete and win the official MLH UK trophy.

Applications will open on Monday (14/7) for one week until the 21st July. You don't need prior hackathon or programming experience to apply and our lottery system proves how much we mean this. There is only one way to increase your odds of being accepted and you'll see what we mean soon.

We plan to make more announcements over the coming weeks and hope to see as many of you for what will be the best StudentHack ever. Woohoo!

Bilawal and Syeef, organisers

[studenthackblog-blog]

Hacker Workshops success!

A few hours ago, our final workshop at University of Manchester fully concluded and it is safe to say both of our workshops were a total success.

Thanks to Elizabeth, Jimmy, Ciprian and Parham for running the workshops, AutoTrader UK for providing relevant and incredibly insightful talks and both Manchester University and Manchester Metropolitan University for providing the awesome venues!

The only thing left for us to rock the actual hackathon. See you there.

Bilawal and Syeef, organisers

[studenthackblog-blog]

The StudentHack iPhone app!

The epicness continues.

We are really excited to announce the StudentHack iOS app. This application will allow you to see our feed, schedule, map of the venue and quickly have access to our awesome concierge service.

We will reveal more about our concierge service at the event but huge thanks are in order for Romain Francez, our iOS developer who will fly over from Paris to mentor over the most epic weekend on earth.

Download the app for free by visiting studenthack.com/ios.

Bilawal and Syeef, organisers

[studenthackblog-blog]

Submit Ideas for StudentHack

You can now submit your idea (or multiple ideas) ahead of the hackathon on February 2014. Plenty of you will be travelling from the other side of the UK to StudentHack so we thought it'd be nice for you to submit early!

This is completely optional. If you don't have an idea yet, or no idea at all, or already decided your team - then you can ignore this. It is another one of our experiments. Deadline is 11.59pm on January 31st.

Give your idea a submission - we'll look forward to seeing it!

Bilawal and Syeef, organisers

[studenthackblog-blog]

Free tickets for females!

The global hackathon community knows that lack of hackathon diversity is a big problem. Female hackers represent less than 10% of our attendance and we want to change that - so we're inviting females of all experience to our epic hackathon!

Thanks to our sponsors, female tickets are free!

As of today, tickets for females will not be charged when ordering from our website. You'll get free access to our awesome hackathon here in Manchester with other females taking advantage of this offer!

After reading this fantastic article by Nancy, we have now identified that our approach to closing the "gender gap" at our hackathon was completely wrong.

As a result, we've now revoked free tickets for females and our efforts from this completely. Anyone who already has a ticket will not be affected. We will continue as per usual to build Europe's most epic student hackathon.

Bilawal and Syeef, organisers

[studenthackblog-blog]

Tickets for Boxing Day: 50% Off

First and foremost, we hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!

In the short space of ticket sales, we have sold nearly half of our entire venue capacity which is crazy considering we haven't announced sponsors or prizes. They will be announced very soon and we couldn't be more excited of them.

However, I can share all of the organisations supporting StudentHack 2014: BBC, Mozilla Foundation, British Computing Society, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Manchester and University of Salford. To clarify: these are not commercial sponsors.

Now - to the exciting offer tomorrow:

Boxing Day: 50% off

Tomorrow between 10am until 11.59pm tickets will cost only £4 (over 50% off) and we are releasing plenty of tickets so you don't miss out.

This will be your last chance to secure a ticket to Europe's hottest student hackathon for less than £9. In case you aren't already convinced, here is a few more reasons why you should come:

Exciting judges to be announced

Event is organised by students (who have been to 15+ hackathons)

All the food and drink you can consume included

Employers love it - plenty are attending to hire talent

Lots of experienced engineers available to help you

Remember: 10am Boxing Day. Grab your ticket here.

Bilawal and Syeef, organisers

[studenthackblog-blog]

Making it open source

This year, we decided to ditch Eventbrite for tickets and so we built our own system. Why? It helps us lower costs and innovate on more parts of our hackathon.

We're not sure about you, but StudentHack loves open source. As quickly as we are growing our hackathon in Europe, we want to reach the global community in a very important way.

Our first open source project: UserQ!

To reach the world, we decided to open source some of the best internal tools we've built. That is why I'm proud to announce UserQ - our first open source project on GitHub.

UserQ powers our ticket reservation system. When you buy a ticket on StudentHack, we only show you the payment page when you are guaranteed a ticket. This improves the user experience massively.

See the screenshow below which demonstrates UserQ:

The feedback for it is great and transaction completion rate is over 50%. It is by no means a new concept but our results tells us it definitely works. We invite you to give UserQ a spin on your app!

Bilawal, founder

P.S. Have a very Merry Christmas!

[studenthackblog-blog]

Another Hacker Workshop!

We are announcing another workshop which is being ran by some amazing engineers with the venue generously provided from the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester.

The workshop will cover APIs which can be used to communicate with many websites including PayPal, YouTube, Twitter and even some of our sponsors' APIs. These are important as it helps you utilise existing tools to help you prototype massively quicker over the hackathon.

These workshops are totally free. They will be ran by some of our previous attendees so they can best prepare you for the most amazing hackathon ever. Get your ticket to the UOM workshop here (or the MMU one).

We'll hopefully see you at one (or both) of our workshops!

Bilawal, founder

[studenthackblog-blog]

First ticket batch sold out

Around 12 hours ago, our first batch of tickets went on sale for £1. We announced this on Saturday and we're proud to announce that we have now sold out of our first set of tickets.

To put it in perspective:

- Our last hackathon had only 50 hackers

- Those 50 tickets took over 4 weeks to sell out

- And we've sold over 50 tickets for our February hackathon in less than 3 hours!

To us, that is insane. Like nuts. Wow. We also trialled our own in-house internal ticketing system which was a phenomenal success. We do have lots more tickets to give out over the coming weeks. Onwards and upwards.

Thank you for helping us make StudentHack one step closer to a reality.

Bilawal and Syeef, organisers

[studenthackblog-blog]

First batch of tickets: £1

We're excited to announce the first batch of StudentHack 2014 tickets will be sold at £1 per ticket. This is crazy for a hackathon - but we're doing it anyway. The amount of tickets at this price are exceptionally limited.

Tickets go on sale Monday 16th December at 9am. We've also got an entirely new way of buying your tickets using Stripe which makes it a much smoother buying experience.

You'll see the blue button as seen below:

Super excited to see how this works out. Remember: 9am Monday.

Bilawal, founder

[studenthackblog-blog]

Here's a JSON file of Apple's UK university stores. Play about with it and have fun. See more here.

[studenthackblog-blog]

Blog is born!

Today is a very exciting day for us as we have a few announcements to make.

StudentHack 2014

Woohoo! The next StudentHack is happening. Feb 8/9 2014 in MMU Business School, Manchester to be exact. It comes from our successful hackathon in May with Microsoft and Ampersand Commerce.

Last time we had 50 students attend. Now we're expecting more than 100 from all around Europe and possibly even beyond. Sponsors and prizes will be announced soon and tickets go on sale 16th Dec.

New: StudentHack workshops

We're announcing free and open workshops in Manchester and Salford in January 2014. These will help you prepare and identify what you will need to help you get the most out of your StudentHack experience.

Launching a blog

About time we had one! This will act as place for our announcements and somewhere for our alumni to come and write about their developments and articles on technical and design subjects. We're super excited to see how this develops as the months go on.

That's all for now. Lots of great stuff coming up with StudentHack.

Bilawal, founder