#moovweb

[content-marketing-strategies]

Digital agility in the new age of mobility means getting to market quickly, delivering great experiences, and learning faster than your competitors.

[diklein]

My first appearance on a podcast!

[gklst-blog]

Beating the hackathon hype in a hack for social good

When planning a hackathon, you have a lot of decisions to make. Food, venue, date, format, tools, schedule. After you’ve made all of your selections, you have an event roughly put together, and follow up with polish and action. It’s the choices you make that define the outcome. At Geeklist we take context and quality for developers with the utmost respect.

For our new series of hackathons, we didn’t want participants to try to find a problem (that may or may not actually exist), build a business model around it, and leave with a prototype, pitch, and prize for spending their time on something they could have built anywhere. In my mind, that’s like cramming for a test you’ve aced a few times already, for a class you took last year.

When planning our Geeklist #hack4good we chose a different path. There are problems that already exist. Problems that affect the lives of people that don’t have the latest smartphone, people that aren’t in traffic, people that don’t have scheduling conflicts or LinkedIn profiles, dinner plans, or even a plan for dinner tonight, or tomorrow. There are problems that already scale, because of earthquakes, flooding, fires and famine. There are verticals as large as 99% of the population. We chose to make this a hackathon for good above all else.

We certainly aren’t the first to encourage hackers to spend their extra cycles on problems that plague society, but we did have the opportunity to make it the theme for Geeklist’s first big event (and future events), and by doing so we hope to inspire more organizers and sponsors to consider what a hackathon can give back, and chose to do good. One thought lingered in our minds: “If so few hackathons take this route, is doing the right thing really the right thing?” You can’t predict the outcome of a hackathon; your involvement shouldn’t be much more than setting the stage.

We built it, and they came.

We set modest goals, knowing that in a first attempt, we’d be lucky to fill the field with teams. Further, we didn’t want to attract people to the event for the wrong reasons, so our signup form didn’t list prizes or awards. We wanted participants that understood what we were hoping to accomplish and could drive each other by betting against the status quo, and choosing at attract hackers for a different purpose. There is definitely an audience here. We were humbled by the response, dedication, support, and drive of the participants. 

See the standout projects in this blog post.

Thanks to the support of our sponsors, Pivotal Labs, Walmart Labs, Moovweb, Startup Monthly, New Relic, Smart Bear, Appsifyme,  we were able to make sure that our participants had an unmatched level of comfort and an inspirational hacking environment, plenty of privacy, resources, nourishment, and access to experts and support teams. Thanks to our sponsors, we were able to give awards and prizes that included donations to nonprofits that our teams built projects for. In total, Geeklist and it’s sponsors exceeded $52,000 in financial and in kind awards and our teams presented 10 brilliant and varied solutions to problems that actually exist today.

Look for our next awesome hackathon coming soon!

Ed Palumbo

Geeklist

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[binaryskipper]

Tech Soup "to go", a mobile transformation of techsoup.org (Moovweb RUNNER UP)

Technologies: scss, Moovweb, Tritium, Uranium.js. People: Me (Stephen Nguyen)

Assisted by: Moovweb Engineers/Team,  Stephane Thomas ( dbc grad)

Link: http://mstephenitis8304.techsoup.org.moovapp.com/

Short Link: www.ubu.pw/Ngjw

Github: https://github.com/Stephenitis/tech_soup_to_go

Story: This weekend I got to go to the #Hack4Good by Geeklist @gklist hosted by Pivotal Labs @pivotallabs. I didn't have any ideas so I let the theme of innovating and building something for a existing nonprofit with a mobile concept and run with it. I thought of a few nonprofits and my experience with MAUVSA and UNAVSA and ended up thinking about a nonprofit that seeks to help other nonprofits. I know... Meta. I chose to try to make a mobile site for Tech Soup's website and make their catalog more accessible. I decided to use the Moovweb framwork after being shown a demo/tutorial of how the platform worked to transform hackernews, a very nonmobile site, into a mobile site. It was interesting to me to see the Tritium language in use because it very much looked like a mix of jquery and css selectors with scopes and methods. The following lines of code creates a div within the header element. 

$("/html/body/header") {

  insert("div", id: "navMenu") {

    attributes(data-ur-set: "tabs")

  }

}

It's interesting how the language was created by the sass/haml guy(s?). I'm a huge fan of haml and sass so I was interested in exploring down the tritium path.

Note on Learning on the Job

Learning a new framework and language during a hackathon is a dangerous proposition, you develop like a snail and need consistent support or great documentation. Luckily I had the resources of Moovweb's many engineers onsite and on hipchat to help answer all my questions. due to the slowdown in what I would be able to accomplish while learning on the job I decided to narrow the scope of what I wanted to achieve to barebones.

Barebones of Tech Soup

The biggest barebones functionality of the techsoup website I wanted to bring mobile was the ability to browse and discover the different software products that techsoup had to offer.

My presentation was well received by everyone all around thanks to a very tight goal and narrow use case. The following are my slides (live demo not included in the presentation but the links are up above).

Tech Soup To Go Presentation 06/30/13 from Stephen Nguyen

http://www.slideshare.net/stephenitis/tech-soup-to-go-presentation-063013

  Post Dev Bootcamp I promised myself that I would keep building tight complete projects weekly if not daily. To ad lib a bit from a famous keynote from a man I admire "stay hungry, or be foolish". Hackathons give me the opportunity to take risk in a very short period of time and be possibly rewarded. #yolo. HAH! neways I ended up tweeting @techsoup on a whim and got notice from the heads over @techsoup and got the best validation you can get on twitter... a favorite and a retweet. (see image above)

  I was rewarded with being the runner up for the 1st Place Moovweb Prize. (sweet loots were had in the form of prizes).

  //tritium

$$("#binaryskipper"){remove()}