Highlights from Fixie’s AI + LLM Seattle Hackathon
This past Saturday, we hosted a hackathon at our Seattle office. The AI + LLM-themed event attracted a diverse group of local builders who showcased their creativity and technical chops by designing, building, and demoing what they could accomplish in only a few hours. To help hackers be productive, Fixie provided our new Sidekicks framework which enables developers to quickly get up and running with an AI-powered app built in React.
Top Projects
Best Hack → The best hack and $1000 prize was awarded to the “News Entity Bot” (Max Forbes, Jackson Beytebiere, Caleb Diehl, Junius Gunaratne). The team built a Fixie Sidekick and deployed it as a browser extension that summarizes news as articles are browsed. The bot also provides a slider to dynamically adjust the summarization based on reading level (e.g. ELI5 to advanced comprehension).
Roll Model Award → “Saasquatch” (Feynman Liang, Siddharth Bedekar, Niole Nelson, Swati Damele) won the Roll Model award. The team built a Fixie Sidekick that was able to make SaaS product recommendations based on end-user needs and on various ranking factors. The team was striving to clean up the “dirty” business of scammy pay-to-play, affiliate marketing, and astro-turfing for software recommendations.
AI Heavyweight Award → The VidiMaps team (Spencer & Emi Brown) made a Fixie Sidekick to build relevant, comprehensive travel itineraries. They did the heavy lifting to integrate the Sidekick into their core application so that VidiMaps users can get the most out of using the product. The Sidekick was embedded directly in the flow of the application and was able to provide real-time guidance to end-users.
Best Catch! Award → Melissa Mitchell created the “UW Course Assistant”, a Fixie Sidekick that helps students at the University of Washington find courses of interest. She made this in response to the pain of trying to find courses across multiple departments and systems.
Thing of Beauty! Award → William Ross, Jerson Morrow, and Lucas Steinmacher joined forces and built a beautifully designed Fixie Sidekick to help with travel and exploration. The Sidekick helps end-users find interesting places and activities in any city.
Wrap-Up
We had a terrific time hosting the event and had the support of two great sponsors: AI2 and DevZero. Thanks for supporting the hackathon! We were excited to see the mix of projects that folks built and are looking forward to hosting more events in the future!
