HackBit @NYU - November 14th, 2014

This Friday I will be blogging about NYU's first Cryptocurrency Hackathon! Currently almost 200 students have registered to participate, and I'll be providing a firsthand look into the world of University Hackathons as it happens.

Overview
This will be an overnight hackathon ending Saturday evening.

The judges:
Fred Wilson - Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures

Jalak Jobanputra -  Founding Partner FuturePerfect Ventures

Ryan Selkis - Director, Investments, Digital Currency Group

Peter Smith - Co-Founder, Blockchain

Adam Ludwin - Founder, Chain Alice Lloyd George Associate, RRE Ventures

The sponsors:

Bloomber LP

Chain Inc

Blockchain

Check back Friday afternoon for updates on NYU's first Crypto hack!

_____________________________________________________________________________


UPDATE: 12:30am Saturday morning

We're well into the hackathon and the TKC Programming club is building a space invaders game that awards players bitcoin for high scores.

_____________________________________________________________________________

UPDATE: 1:20am

Lego competition went well and we walked away with Pebble smart watches!

_____________________________________________________________________________

Conclusion:

NYU sure knows how to throw a great hackathon. The university provided plenty of great food throughout the event (even a massive midnight Chinese meal!), and really brought in a huge amount of talent to compete.

Many schools were represented, and the judging panel was made up of representatives from many of the East Coast's top VC firms like Fred Wilson and well known Bitcoin community members like Yifu Guo. The sponsors and mentors were phenomenal as well. Both the Blockchain team members and the Chain founders stuck around the whole time and were a great help to us in our project.

I highly recommend attending one of NYU's hackathons if you ever get the chance. Everything about it was perfectly organized and we had a ton of fun meeting new people and working on our project (which, by the way, ended up taking first place!).

Spooky EmberJS October Meetup

This Thursday the EmberJS NYC meetup gathered over free pizza and beer (provided very kindly by Pivotal Labs). The AngularJS meetup is also often hosted here at Pivotal, and I have to say they're really phenominal hosts. There's always someone there to take care of all the AV for the meetup, and providing an open space for the various development communities to meet is really a great thing for the NYC developer culture.

While I've never used Ember myself, it was really great getting to know more about the JavaScript community here in NYC.

This meetup was organized into two sections. The first was a series of three lightning talks:

1. Gaurav Munjal - Gaurav spoke about a new ember CLI tool he is working on that integrates JQuery UI seamlessly.
2. Katie Gengler - Katie is the CTO of funding Gates. She presented on a few concepts that are pretty fundamental to the way Ember works, yet are either poorly documented or difficult to find resources for.
3. Nik Nyby - Presented on a game he is working on that is meant to demonstrate the effects of climate change to students. While the game is currently just operating in an excel spreadsheet, he is hoping to move it to a browser extension. You can find his source code here: https://github.com/ccnmtl/wacep

The final presentation of the night was a full length presentation by Luke Melia named "Spooky Ember". Luke is the founder of the EmberJS meetup in NYC, and his talk tonight was focused on exploring some of the more esoteric corners of Ember. 

The initial lightening talks went well, though they were a bit of a bore. There was a brief break taken for the audience to grab more pizza and a second beer. After a little bit of chatting, the lights in the room went dark. Everyone was a little confused, and, suddenly, a cloaked figure, bound in chains, came shuffling across the front of the room. His raspy voice echoed over the sound system. Luke Melia had arrived to give his halloween Ember talk.

The crowd was entirely drawn in. Luke is an expert speaker and, after a few ghostly jokes, and a pun or two about eating the brains of those who volunteered to answer his questions, we were treated to 45 minutes of very educational lecture with a wonderful amount of crowd involvement.

One of the best things about living in NYC is that we have the opportunity to participate in these communities and learn things with a group of people that we would have no chance to otherwise. If you live in a city where meetups are a common thing, then I definitely recommend you find one on a topic you'd like to learn more about. If you get lucky, it might be led by someone like Luke.

Intel's Internet of Things Hackathon

My reaction to some blinking lights.

This weekend Intel hosted a hackathon at Huge to promote the Galileo and the Edison, their line of maker-oriented modular computers. The first 100 pre-registered attendees was given an incredibly generous bag of hardware:

• 1 Intel Edison
• 1 Intel Galileo
• 1 Grove Starter Kit
• Bag of useful cables
• 8gb USB with a bunch of tutorials, documentation, and getting started guides.

In total, without any winnings or additional prizes (they were pretty liberal with the prize giving, but we didn't get lucky), we ended up walking out with around $600 worth of hardware at the end of the first day.

The people who presented to the 200ish individuals in attendance stayed throughout the hackathon working on their own projects and helping the other groups when they needed it. We got to hear from the Octoblu team about a project to consolidate APIs into one visual interface that allows users to forgo any kind of intense documentation study. I know a few teams made use of their (currently free) service in their projects. One of the more interesting ones they told us about was using their system to operate some limited capabilities on a car that Intel gave them to hack on.

I was mostly focused on getting familiar with the hardware. The documentation was unfortunately sparse on most of the components, especially for the newly added JavaScript compatibility (made possible with node.js). If you knew C or C++ you were in a better place, but for web guys like me, it was rough trying to figure out how things worked.

Intel made this weekend pretty great for everyone. Free computers. Free learning. Free food. I'm looking forward to the next large scale hackathon that comes to town. If it's anything like this one was, it'll be a great time.