5 Hackathon Development Timesavers for New Coders
I was lucky to visit San Francisco recently. Since I was in the startup capital of the world, I decided to crash a local hackathon. Turns out this year's Launch Hackathon was taking place, and some friends were participating.
As with any elite coding sprint competition, teams leverage on time saving services as much as they can. So, in light of helping fellow developers: Here are some wonderful MVP friendly tools useful to speed up your prototype launches.
Api.ai
Api.ai is a voice recognition backend that enables developers to build voice based UIs. Since the company CEO was a judge at Launch, many teams were using it for pretty interesting voice UI projects. Applications for this technology range from hands free control of technology to healthcare and creative coding. The way to use Api.ai, is to create an agent to interact with your application. After the agent is created, you add objects to it - entities you can interact with. Each entity can then be associated with various intents, which are natural language questions the voice recognition platform will interpret as queries. Initial configuration is all point and click, and very easy to set up. Interactions are piled up, so even if the recognition algorithm messes up, you can easily pop an undo action. If you're experimenting with voice controlled VR, wearables, or IoT; Api.ai is worth reviewing.
HTML5up
HTML5up provides nice code skeletons ready for a team to start working on. If you want to pull together a quick MVP or landing page, this is a big time saver. All of HTML5up templates are free under Creative Commons licenses. As simple as that. On the other hand, if what you need is a boilerplate, the usual Bootstrap, Semantic UI, or Foundation resources can be a great starting point there.
Dropsource
This is a lifesaver for mobile development. It's like Webflow or Weebly for native app development, with a database agnostic twist. Dropsource is a drag and drop tool where you can easily develop your mobile app's UI and its interaction with a database. If your application's RESTful API supports JSON, has an API Key, and has logical status code responses, you can easily adopt Dropsource into your prototype, or company, for that matter. I was lucky enough to meet the founders in Raleigh, North Carolina, and can’t assert this enough: Startup teams should totally try this.
React.js
You've probably heard about React due to the recent hype around it. If not, it is a must-learn. React is a view layer for web apps that allows you to build complex UI using pre-defined components that output an interactive web layout. The beauty about React is that even when its initial learning curve can be steep, after a few tutorials: BOOM. Everything seems clean. It's also scales very well as projects grow larger. Since React only accounts for the "V", or View, in an MVC (Model-View-Controller) model, experimenting with complimentary libraries like RxJs, Redux, Flux, and the like will be due.
Firebase
Recently acquired by Google, Firebase is a hassle free backend and elastic database tool. It’s readily available in the cloud and supports email and many social authentication options for your app. Data stored in Firebase uses the JSON format, and URLs are generated automatically with your models, so it makes things trivial if you want to create REST endpoints for your data. It’s ideal for the rapid deployment needed in a hackathon setting, since it already has libraries that support commonly used technologies like React, Ionic, and Angular. If you're looking for an alternative, Parse is also a nice option to explore.
I'll keep updating this post as new things come up and learn new things, but for now I hope these are some useful tools for hackathon developers beyond Silicon Valley. If you know of better technologies or other time saving platforms, please feel free to collaborate replying to this post. Happy coding!
