TLV Hacks: We Built Awesome Things For Hack Week
Once a year Kik hosts an annual Hackathon week at all of its distributed sites across the globe. Everyone who seems themselves connected to Kik or Kin in any way gets the chance to learn, grow, and experiment by putting down the normal day-to-day tasks and exploring new ideas. It’s a week where we can test out new technologies and work together to make something awesome. For one week, we’re able to work on anything, as long as it’s related to making Kik better and bigger and moving us forward as a company and as a culture.
This year, we could choose to focus on one of the following categories: open-source, Kin experiences and culture in Kik. The teams participating in Tel Aviv focused on various projects related to Kin and its implementation in different applications.
Here are our four favorite projects related to Kin that different teams were working on and were presented at the end of the Hack week:
- Kin Kong
Kin Kong is a trivia game application that was designed for the crypto community. The idea was born from ‘HQ — Live Trivia Game Show’ which is a live streaming trivia game with cash prizes. With a little twist, the team decided to distribute KIN among our crypto community members via a similar app that we will build in-house. There’s even a video presenting the game and its rules (at the end of this post).
2. KinOverflow
KinOverflow aims to demonstrate how real monetary value can be given to users contributing to stack overflow using KIN. The app gives contributors an initial award in KIN and then lets them use some of that KIN to tip other contributors for adding useful questions and good answers to the community. The app uses the Android kin sdk to award and tip users with testnet Kin and pulls real questions and answers from stack overflow using the stack-exchange api.
3. Kinstagram
The idea was to integrate Kin into photo and video social sharing apps. Friends and followers can show their appreciations by sending real KIN. This way, users can earn KIN for what is now an integral part of our digital life. In addition, the top earning photo and video will get daily, weekly or monthly award. This is a seamless way to earn and spend KIN.
4. Word2vec Spam Filter
A simple implementation for classification of spam messages on the client without compromising the user’s privacy. In this project developers used word vectors to summarise and compare between spam messages. In order to determine whether an incoming message is spam, the client sends a vector representation of the message to the server instead of the message itself. The server then compares that vector against a bank of known spam messages collected from previous spam reports.
During the Hackathon the developers in each project built a very basic proof of work. Building a full scale app (being a live trivia game, social sharing app or a real tipping system) Requires a lot of work and development that are beyond the scope of this week.
However, we felt this was a good chance to open a community based Github repository, where we can upload any community based (or driven) product, app or code. We knew that now that we have a Kin Contributor’s Blog page, it’s time to have repository where anyone who sees themselves as a Kin enthusiasts can share their contribution to this project. In the near future you’ll be able to access the repository with all of these projects:
- Kin Kong
- KinOverflow
- KinTipper
- Kinstagram
This year 19 teams participated in the Hack week and guess what?! The Kin Kong app won the coveted Hack week Seal of Approval prize!!!
Check out the intro video explaining how the game works:
