You made me not sleep much (only 2 hours) throughout the weekend, you made write code on a platform I’m not familiar with (Android and Android Wear) and last but not least, you made me present our project in the most awkwardly way I can. But that’s the fun with hackathons. You have an idea and you have a limited amount of time to make that idea happen.
The Idea
A friend/teammate had recently bought a Moto 360 smartwatch. That watch has a shit heartrate sensor. We used Android Wear to monitor a persons heartrate and send the value to the phone to create a graph that displays the value over time of the heartrate. We wanted to send those value further to an App in the cloud and do some aditional processing with it, maybe give access to the persons doctor to see the graphs. Sadly time was limited and we haven’t managed to implement this part, but we did manage to complete the watch-phone interaction.
The atmosphere
Unlike the last hackathon I attended, this one was free. You’d expect to bring food / drinks from home. Not the case. Thanks to generous sponsors we had 5 meals (2 breakfasts, 2 lunches, 1 dinner). It was a 48-ish hour event so a second dinner was not needed. The lunch from the second day was enough to last throughout dinner though so that was nice.
Code in the Dark
The thing that really stuck with me this time was a challenge that’s called Code in the Dark. The premise is simple, you’re given a site and have to reproduce it as best as you can without previewing it / using code completion software. The results are always hilarious.
End of weekend
As you can already see I didn’t talk about prizes. We didn’t win one. We did however get some sweet swag. The prizes are not that important. At least not for me. All I wanted was to see our app finished. It wasn’t finished as we would’ve wanted, but it was finished enough to be a proof of concept. That for me was more than enough.
Hope you enjoyed this small read. I would like to read your comments below.
UPDATE: This track pretty much describes how the weekend went.