The Facebook Hackathon
Menlo Park, California
We are a team of Computer Scientists from the University of Manchester. We recently won Facebook’s Global Hackathon Finals. This is our story!
Jessie Abramson
Antonio Marino
Bartlomiej Siemieniuk Mark Larah
London
It started in Shoreditch, London. Close to 600 people applied to attend the London Regional event. After an online coding qualification round, the amount of participants was reduced to around 120, or about 30 teams.
Hackathon day came, and we found ourselves in a room with teams from Oxbridge, Imperial, etc. The event was great, everyone was really nice, and the famously awesome Facebook food certainly lived up to the hype. 24 hours later, we demoed our winning hack — ZukerScript, a brand new programming language to allow newbie programmers to create engaging desktop apps with a simple syntax, and the Facebook API baked in.
“Can confirm: ZuckScript is hilariously good fun to develop in. They’re very flexible to feature requests too☺” — Joe Nash
We also built some fun things into it like UDP networking that allowed us to also fly an AR Drone in our demo…just because we could. That seemed to impress the judges enough for them to send us out to California for the finals, which was awfully nice of them.
California
8 months later, and 2 of us find ourselves on the back seat of a Boeing 737 flying out to San Francisco, surrounded by more tech than the pilots. We were hurriedly trying to teach ourselves some more of the iOS APIs in Swift, and completing a UML diagram for our app.
We knew what we’d wanted to build in advance. It seemed like a crazy, overly ambitious idea — an iOS app to create iOS apps. We had a million features that had to be built into the app, and almost zero experience building natively for iOS. And as ever, just 24 hours to do it all in. What could possibly go wrong?
AppChef (formerly known as iRoboros) is an idea that we haven’t seen done before. Using a drag and drop prototyping interface, users are able to drag on elements to a blank app screen. By dragging arrows and hooking up models to these elements, you can set data to populate the app (sourced from Parse or a JSON API endpoint). Logic was also set by the dragging of arrows between elements. (Not easy to succinctly decribe in text, the video explains it better!)
In addition, once the app was created, we had a “play” mode, to allow you to try the app on the device you were making it on. Also present was a button to send it off to the server such that you could download the Xcode project, and another button to allow you to submit the app straight to the app store. What made this different to the thousands of prototyping apps already out there is that you made this straight on your iOS device, lowering the barrier to entry into app development for absolute begginers. There’s something different about feeling, holding and being able to touch your app rather than it just being on a computer screen.
I’m pleased to say we more or less finished the app, in what was the most gruelling 24 hours at a hackthon I’ve ever experienced. It is a great shame that I didn’t really have more time during the event to go round and speak to many of the other contestants - the few that I did manage to meet were all extremely friendly, and very talented programmers. One of my favourite things about attending hackathons is the opportunity to meet great people and make contacts. Despite it being a competition, the camaraderie was fantastic, and I learned a lot from some of the other contestants. There were 18 teams in total from around the world, including Singapore, Mexico and Brazil.
AppChef is something we’re incredibly proud of having been able to build in such a short space of time. It’s definitely something we’ll be looking at taking forward and developing into a releasable product.
I’d like to thank everyone at Facebook (especially Bambi), and all the other competitors who made the event so enjoyable. Shout out to two of my personal favourite hacks:
- The team who used a Raspberry Pi to allow multiple computers to wirelessely beam their screen to a projector, using another computer to control which screen was being displayed.
- Gravity (which won 2nd prize) - an app to wirelessly share contact information between iOS devices, encoding the data in vibrations, with the most amazing animations.
Stay tuned for another post about how we did it, and some general tips on winning hackathons!
The Team:
- Mark Larah
- Jessie Abramson
- Antonio Marino
- Bartlomiej Siemieniuk
