The Hackathon: A personal note

It was only about two weeks ago when I came up with the idea of having a webOS hackathon (thanks to Ed Finkler for the inspiration). If you think about it, two weeks is not a very long time to coordinate and get an event like this running, but we managed to pull it off.

In all honesty, I didn’t know what to expect…would anyone be interested? How many devs would there be? Would we actually build an app from scratch in 1 day?

In the end though, I couldn’t have been more pleased or excited with the results. The webOS community really is second to none, and I think that this event is just proof of that.

In the end, we had 21 developers/designers join in on some part of the app.

We had 121 people join us at one time in the chat, but it hovered around 35 for most of the day.

This really was a group effort, but I believe that some efforts deserve a little recognition.

• @sugar_dave (Dave Freeman): Thanks for giving us the name Relego. For those who don’t know, Relego means “reread” in Latin (among other things)
• Jordan Gensler: Gave us our awesome icon and help us get that persnickety splash screen working
• Janni Kovaks: Literally stayed up all night to help us pull things together. You are quite the trooper.
• James Harris: Created the patch and helped coordinate the event when we had issues with Skype
• Roy Sutton: Managed Git and all of its…eccentricities.
• Markus Leutwyler: Another awesome dev from across the pond who stayed up late to help out
• Jeremy Thomas (@germboy): Stayed till the end (1:30 am eastern) to make sure we had some working bookmarks.
• Dave Balmer: Another example of how awesome Palm is. Dave stayed till the end working to get the last bits working.
• Brian Haeffner: Created our preferences screen and helped out whenever possible.
• Rene Meister: Awesome dev who put in a little “sumthin sumthin” for those who are up for a hunt.
• Will Honey: Another night owl who got the main list screen workin’.
• Frank Zammetti: Entertained us with ridiculously hard sci-fi questions throughout the day. Also was instrumental building the API hooks.
• Ed Finkler: Hackathon extraordinaire…helped us know what to expect with such an event.

I know I am forgetting some people, and I apologize for that. There were so many people who helped out in one way or another and I personally thank you very much.

In the end we created a solid beta version of Relego. It isn’t perfect, but we still have a team in place who is working on it. If you want to join in, you can see what needs to be done at our wiki page. You can also talk to our dev guru Roy Sutton (roy at webosroundup dot com) if you have questions about getting plugged in.

Thank you, once again, to everyone who coded, designed, chatted, or cheered us on throughout the day. Can’t wait for the next one.

David