The Story Behind #PebblePickup
Learning, meeting new people, and being challenged are all things that hackathon attendees hope will happen during their 24 or 36 hours, but in reality a hackathon experience is dependent on many more factors.
Upon arrival in Michigan for MHacks, I had no clue of what my “hack” would be or who I would be hacking with; all I knew was I wanted to learn something new and engage with technologies I had not done so before. Little did I know that these conditions would be found by creating an app about pick-up lines! (I’m a girl and don’t use pick up lines very often)
When I met Faizan (GeorgeTech student), Ashay (GeorgeTech student), and Christian (FSU student), they told me to picture the following scenario:
“You are walking down the hall on your college campus when you suddenly see a cute boy, but as a computer science major and given your nerves, you are lost for words.
“You now have two options, continue walking and miss the chance of talking to the potential love of your life, orrrrrrrrr flick your wrist and get an awesome pick up line that will conquer his heart.”
Needless to say, they did not need any further explanation, nor a pick-up line to get me on their team.
Pebble PickUp creates its pick-up lines database from approved Tweets made with the hashtag Pebble PickUp and randomizes them in order to offer a variety of lines whenever you need one.
In order to create Pebble PickUp we used Pebble’s cloud, a platform that allows developers to code in Javascript without the need of downloading any software, an API we created using Kimono in order to feed the Tweets into our database, and later, Stap’s Strap Kit to convert our Javascript Code into one that works for Android Wear.
Luckily for us, Strap had several mentors at MHacks and it was thanks to their help that we became aware of Strap Kit and were able to create a product that functions successfully on the Pebble watch and Android Wear (available on Google Play).
Strap is a software and analytics platform that focuses on wearable devices. During the hackathon my team used Strap’s software platform (Strap Kit) to easily convert the Pebble code into one for Android, and downloaded the analytics software in order to observe the behavior of our users and the usage of our app.
