Hack Recap: PennApps XIII

Last weekend, we attended the 13th semi-annual hackathon PennApps. Over 1200 students from all over the country braved one of Philadelphia’s largest blizzards in history.

We kicked off the weekend with a drink up at “Charlie was a sinner.” in Rittenhouse Square. Special thanks to our lovely community manager Sara Nachman for hosting the event, and inviting friends.

Irvine Auditorium on UPenn’s campus was packed for the opening ceremony with a keynote from First Round Capital, and amazing API presentations from companies like Houndify and Plaid.

Johnson & Johnson unveiled a new API that lets developers tap into a patient’s diabetic record.

As two feet of freshly packed snow blanketed and whipped through the city, hackers tapped into the Postmates delivery API. Here are some of our favorite projects from the weekend:

• Foodship is a platform for restaurant owners and homeless shelters to delivery leftover food that would have normally been thrown out.
• FourPly could have been a finalist at Comedy Hack Day. Their interactive restroom app allowed you to order toiletries when they run out, without ever leaving the stall. Here’s a video demo:

• Sugar Trails helps diabetics moderate their glucose levels. They can see their data throughout an 80-day period and can order food based on their current glucose level. Here is team Sugar Trails:

• Alco-Mate was a crowd favorite. This hardware hack is a mini breathalizer connected to an army of API services that help you catch a taxi, avoiding spending too much money out at the bar, or order pizza for when you get home. Here’s a video demo of Alco-Mate:

Refresh was a unique usage of a future Postmates API feature: auto-reordering of items when they run out.

By keeping track of the shelf life of items in your fridge, and syncing that with items from receipts, they can figure out when you need to order more groceries. Here’s Team Refresh:

Finally, Bowerbird was the winner of the Best On-Demand Hack. This mixed team of high school and college students created a mobile app using Johnson & Johnson’s API with Postmates to prescribe medication for their patients and have it delivered from the pharmacy.

Special shoutout to Sara and two of our engineers, Evan Yang and Jose Browne, for attending alongside me. We hope to sponsor PennApps XIV in the Fall. And thanks to all the students who hacked with us in Philly!

Here are some other hacks that were competing for the Best On-Demand Hack at PennApps.

Next up for us is HackTech in Pasadena in February, the official SxSW Music Hack Championship in March, and LAHacks at UCLA in April.

As always, follow us on Twitter (@PostmatesDev), and register for a developer account to stay in tune with API updates.

Andrew Mager (@mager) is a Developer Advocate at Postmates.