The Largest Hackathon in Western Canada: Our Recap of nwHacks 2018
24 hours, 666 hackers and 114 projects submitted… needless to say that nwHacks 2018 was an utter success this past weekend.
As the largest hackathon in Western Canada, nwHacks brings together the thriving student developer community from across the Pacific Northwest to code, design, and build pioneering projects. RightMesh was proud to take part both as mentors and sponsors of this great event.
The weekend kicked off with Dr. Jason Ernst, our Chief Technology Officer, teaching a workshop on ‘How to Build a Mesh Networking App Using RightMesh’. Following his talk’s conclusion the excitement of the students was apparent. We saw a quick uptake of 49 developers performing 2,000 RightMesh compiles using our library. This was four times the amount that our internal team does in a day. Their enthusiasm was infectious and kept our team running at full speed to offer mentorship and support into the wee hours of the morning.
Throughout the course of nwHacks we challenged the developers to build an app for social impact using the RightMesh platform. Judging criteria was based off of technical difficulty, originality, user experience and practicality. Although there were many great apps created, the winner of the Best Mobile App using the RightMesk SDK and prize of $1,000 Etherium was Huddle!
Winner
Name: Huddle
What They Do: A social safety app used to assist travelling groups and to quickly notify them if a person is missing from the rest.
Inspiration: “Inspired by personal experience of commonly getting separated in groups and knowing how inconvenient and sometimes dangerous it can be, we aimed to create an application that kept people together. We were inspired by how interlinked and connected we are today by our devices and sought to address social issues while using the advancements in decentralized compute and communication.
Created By: Donney F, Thomas Nakagawa, Carolyn Yip and Jimmy Huang.
Honourable Mentions: (How many do we want??)
Name: JTTPSoft Soundbomb
What They Do: An application that synchronizes audio on multiple phones using RightMesh wireless communication systems.
Name: Narwhal Chat
What They Do: A communications app that uses RightMesh’s API to automatically connect local users together within a single chat room without the use of Wifi or cell-tower Connection. It can utilise the mesh network through a phone’s independent WiFi hotspot and bluetooth features to connect multiple users in high density areas into an effective chat room for anonymous communication.
Name: Meshenger,
What They Do: A messaging app to connect individuals through a mesh network.
Name: Hello Vote
What They Do: A voting app for RightMesh that provides offline data collection and result send outs.
Name: MeetMinus
What They Do: Reduces the need to communicate over text while driving by alerting certain contacts of choice once you’ve arrived to a specified location.
Overall, the RightMesh team was blown away by the innovative work that the participants produced. Thank you to all of those that came out and congratulations to the winners. See you next year!
