Wildhacks 2015 Recap
Last weekend, we participated in one of the largest collegiate hackathons in the Midwest: Wildhacks 2015. The wonderful student organizers invited us, along with 500 students from all over the country to the frosty Northwestern University campus to build, hack, and learn together.
At the end of the hackathon, six teams used the Postmates API. We had a great time meeting new friends, learning about new technologies, and getting feedback about our platform over the weekend.
Here are some of the projects created in 24 hours using on-demand delivery:
Open Kitchen
The winner of the best usage of the Postmates API was Open Kitchen.
The service allows people in need of food to order food from people who want to cook food. Here’s a live demo from the team:
Cross-hacking the Walgreens API
We co-hosted a prize with our friends from Walgreens. Besides winning credits from both companies, the winning team will get an opportunity to have lunch with the Walgreens API team to continue their hack into a final product.
Here are a few of the cross-API hacks using Postmates & Walgreens:
PolarFeed
PolarFeed used Walgreen’s API and IBM Bluemix to create a mobile app for users to post pictures from events and choose pictures that you can print out to keep for life.
These guys were able to get it working on Android, but unfortunately had a live demo fail here:
PhotoMate
PhotoMate was created by three students from University of Pennsylvania and it allows you to upload photos to a web form, search for nearest Walgreens and then have Postmates delivery your photos to you.
JiffyPrint
This Chrome extension and web app is a fast and easy way to print posters from any image you see on the web.
This also uses the Walgreens API to find the nearest location for your photos to be printed and delivered with Postmates.
High Steaks: A Postmates Adventure
While this hack didn’t actually use our API, it was a fun game to play and the idea is solid. The object of High Steaks is to weave and dodge burritos on a Postmates bike and if you score 10,000 points, you can get a burrito delivered from Chipotle.
Pushing Buttons
Finally, another app that delivers you burritos. Push Buttons is a hardware hack using Arduino, Node.js, Python, and Firebase. Just push the button, and you can send a greeting to a friend, or order food from Postmates.
In our spare time, Aabhas Sharma (from our infrastructure team) and I started to build a hack called Textmates. The app is an SMS-based food-ordering service that sends you the best possible food item based on what you text. We got it working to where it sends back an address of the best match for a given food item:
The next step will be to fully integrate it with Postmates deliveries, but I think we’ll have to wait until PennApps 2016 to do that. You can see more photos from Wildhacks here.
That wraps up our hackathon schedule for 2015. We’re excited to participate in more MLH hackathons next year. As always, stay up-to-date with all of our events via Twitter and our developer website.
Andrew Mager (@mager) is a Developer Advocate at Postmates.
