Spaz Hackathon Wrap-Up

Remember a couple weeks ago when we told you about this year’s Spaz Hackathon? Well in case you forgot, this year the Spaz Hackathon was held at the PHP Community Conference in Nashville. Luckily, I happened to be vacationing in Nashville at the time so I was able to pop in for a couple minutes to see the Spaz Hackathon kick off.

I gotta say that the PHP Community Conference brought forth a lot of developers who showed interest in participating in the Spaz Hackathon. As a matter of fact, some of them expressed interest in developing for webOS in the future, which is always a good thing. In the end Ed was able to rally the crowd to get quite a bit accomplished on both the desktop and webOS Spaz applications. Thankfully, there were plenty of prizes/swag to go around courtesy of HP and Appcelerator. More specifically, there were three Pre 2 smartphones to give out to the top three contributors!

Unfortunately, I did not get to stay at the event long. I was on vacation and my wife would probably have killed me if I had stayed all night. I did manage to snag a couple of pics of the event as well as two videos of Ed telling everyone what the hackathon was all about. Since I didn’t get to stay I had to get the results of the hackathon from Ed. So without further ado we have a quick message from Ed:

Our three winners:

Clay Hinson (@clayhinson)

Clay developed a new Spaz web API for transport of “last read messages” between clients.

Jake McGraw (@jakemcgraw)

Jake added a feature to Spaz Desktop to send messages with SHIFT+ENTER rather than ENTER, which makes it slightly less likely for you to send something prematurely.

Joel Hutchinson

Joel developed a new plug-in filter for blacklisting messages based on keywords.

The Hackathon was a big success, and has spawned a couple new Spaz — and webOS — devs. I really am happy we were able to do it. Big thanks to Tropo for sponsoring, HP for providing prizes and awesome hats, and Appcelerator for providing a ton of t-shirts.

–
Ed Finkler

Ultimately I had a blast of a time despite not being able to stay long and leaving my good camera back home in Orlando! Please don’t bash me too much for the poor quality of  the photos/videos but I did my best with what I had on hand. I would like to take this opportunity to personally thank Tropo, Appcelerator, HP, the hackathon participants, and Ed for making this happen. I think I can speak for the whole site when I say that I can’t wait to see the new features hit Spaz in the near future!