Upcoming Vancouver Hackathons
We’ve got a ton of hackathons happening in Vancouver over the next little while. If you want to flex your programming muscles, there are lots of upcoming opportunities.
Open Data Hackathon - February 25th
This coming Saturday, the iQmetrix offices play host to an Open Data Hackathon put on by the Vancouver Tech Cofounders Meetup.
On Feb. 25th, join a group of talented designers, developers and product people to help turn open data into useful applications in one day!
Open Data Hackathon is a great opportunity to flex your ‘Build It’ muscle and create useful applications with a team of talented individuals.
How It Works:
9am – We do a quick brainstorming exercise and then pitch ideas to the room
10am – Teams are formed around the top ideas, you vote with your feet.
11am to 4pm – We build!
4pm – We have judges (TBD) come to give feedback on the products. The most useful application wins!
5pm – We wrap up the celebration with tasty beer courtesy of the good folks at iQmetrix.
Sign up for Open Data Hackathon »
White Day Hackathon – March 10th
A Thinking Ape and Silicon Sisters are organizing a hackathon around White Day – the day where men “pay back” women with gifts one month after Valentine’s Day. More from the site:
The aim of White Day Hackathon is to create a coding environment that’s friendly to female developers (but everyone’s welcome to come!).
Devs will get the chance to meet other coders (experienced and aspiring) and work in groups of 1-3 to make some wicked apps.
We’ll start with a mixer on Friday night where we’ll share ideas, meet fellow devs, and build groups before we spend Saturday hacking together something cool.
Sign up for White Day Hackathon »
And of course, the HackVAN event on March 24th »
Got other developer / programming related events in Vancouver? Let us know, we’d love to share.
Featured API – YellowAPI.com
When you first start researching the Yellow Pages API, it seems pretty basic – 4 endpoints, a handful of options. But when you start working with it you and realize the depth of their dataset and how well put together their API support is, the possibilities are endless!
YellowAPI provides 4 basic endpoints for developers – FindBusiness, GetBusinessDetails, FindDealer, and GetTypeAhead. It starts off as a pretty standard business lookup tool, where you can use keywords, locations, and coordinates to get a list of businesses. From there, you get access to all of the rich, curated data from the Yellow Pages dataset, including phone numbers, business categories, product information, videos, photos, and business logos.
But the real power comes from the documentation. Using their “I/O Docs”, you can easily test out calls to the API from the browser, seeing exactly what your query should look like and what the resulting XML or JSON will be. Having a tool like this is extremely helpful to developers, and this is a great example for other APIs what interactive documentation should look like. On top of that, YellowAPI offers a handful of SDKs and tools for quick app development, for platforms like iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby. This makes API integration even easier for developers using those platforms.
YellowAPI also offers a Developer Program, which is a program they use to support developers using their API. They offer some seed money, support services to help launch your app, co-marketing opportunities, pay per performance models, and ad network solutions. Example applications that have used this program include Reservely, RendezView, MoodFood, Finish My Basement, HuWhere and Foodtree.
YellowAPI has been with Hackdays almost since inception. Since 2010, YellowAPI has been the lead sponsor of Hackdays.ca across Canada, ensuring the dev community was supported and the Hackdays.ca brand seen from coast to coast. They took part in our first hack in Nov 2010 in MTL and haven’t looked back since with hacks in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Waterloo, Guelph and of course where we find ourselves today – HackREGINA is just around the corner. YellowAPI has signed on again as a sponsor for 2012 and we are looking to have lots of fun!
YellowAPI is one of the primary sponsors for our upcoming events, HackREGINA, HackVAN, and HackTO.
HackVAN Friday mixer at the Electric Owl, sponsored by Unbounce
Now that we’ve got the day-of venue sorted out, it’s time to start filling in some of the other pieces.
The Friday mixer – where developers get a chance to meet each other, form teams, and strategize – will be held at the Electric Owl, a cool space on Main Street. It will go from 6:30pm to 9pm – after all, you have to get a good night’s sleep in order to spend the entire next day coding!
Your registration for HackVAN gets you in the door to the mixer, and includes the first drink ticket on us.
This is also an opportunity for non-developers and people who won’t be hacking all day to meet the teams, the API providers, and in general mingle with all the great people from the Vancouver tech community. Whichever category you fall into, it all starts by buying your $10 HackVAN ticket over on Eventbrite »
I’m also very pleased to announce that Unbounce has stepped up as the party sponsor, making it possible for us to put on the entire event. Unbounce is a great landing page platform built here in Vancouver – they announced their funding round at last year’s GrowCONF and are continuing to grow quickly. Check out the Rails, JavaScript, and DevOps positions they’re hiring for »
more »
HackVAN Venue will be at A Thinking Ape offices
Our original plan for HackVAN was to use the iQmetrix space, since we host a lot of meetups. But Leila said “Let’s go BIG!! Let’s get a 100 developers!”, and it was clear that we needed bigger space.
Luckily we connected with A Thinking Ape, who have awesome new offices in Gastown. From giant bean bag chairs to great wifi, developers will have everything they need to do some great API hacking.
Thank you very much to A Thinking Ape for being the venue sponsor and hosting us all!
Not registered yet? Head over to buy your ticket at Eventbrite »
We’re also lucky enough to have Kenshi Arasaki, one of the founders of A Thinking Ape, as one of the judges for HackVAN. Of last year’s judges, Kenshi was the one that was most impressed by a focus on difficult technical hacks.
Here’s more about Kenshi:
Kenshi has dreams of creating the next great mobile social experience. Prior to co-founding A Thinking Ape, he was helping to engineer great things at Amazon. Kenshi and his partner Wilkins went through the YCombinator program in 2008 and have now joined forces with Eric Diep to create addictive mobile applications. When he’s not mapping the destiny of the future mobile world, he likes to flail his arms around and yell ‘wild boar!’. For the most part, it’s received kindly.
A HackDays event from the Dev’s Perspective
[You can register for HackREGINA now by going to http://hackregina2012.eventbrite.com/]
I started working with Hackdays.ca shortly after attending their HackVAN event in Vancouver, BC. I attended their event with two of my co-workers, Herb and Willson. We had been scheming the last few days before the event about the application we were going to make using the sponsor APIs that hackdays.ca had just listed on the website. After trading ideas back and forth with some of our co-workers, someone had mentioned how they really would have liked an application to plan out a motorcycle road trip that they had recently gone on. Using YellowAPI and Google Maps, we had found our “killer app” 
We got to the Mozilla offices in downtown Vancouver around 8:30 AM and grabbed some breakfast snacks before joining everyone in the main developer area. Once everyone had settled, each sponsored API team gave a short presentation about their API, including what it’s currently used for, quick information on how to setup an account, and who to ask if there’s any questions. After those were completed, we got to work. We immediately setup a GitHub repository to share our code in, and the three of us broke up some tasks to complete – I was on the API calling side, Herb focused on the mapping functionality, and Willson was on layout and styling. We worked together really well, especially since we were on the same team at work and knew each other’s strengths beforehand.
Other participants at the hackathon were forming groups with their neighbors and hashing out ideas with one another. I found it amazing how quickly some teams got organized, developed an idea, and were ready to go, especially since they had just met each other in the last 30 minutes. I do think some of the teams that had attended the meetup the night before had a bit of an advantage, as they were able to find team members that had complimentary strengths, as well as meet some of the API teams that were there and get information in advance. But all in all, we were pretty confident in our idea and our ability to implement.
Some of the hackdays organizers were taking a quick survey of everyone’s applications to ensure there weren’t any duplicate apps being created, as well as to give others a chance to join an existing team if they hadn’t found anyone yet. Before we realized what time it was, at noon pizza was delivered! Surprisingly there wasn’t a mad rush for lunch though – everyone was too focused on their projects. Some teams even sent a team member to get food for everyone else! It was a great atmosphere to get work done – lots of collaboration and discussion, and the API sponsors were a great support to everyone.
We had a pretty solid working demo around 3 PM that day, but there were tons of little tweaks we wanted to add to our application. We were still in the middle of tweak #476 when the 5 o’clock alarm went off. Everyone quit working on their projects and grabbed a beer while the judges of the day were introduced. Each judge gave a short spiel about where they worked and their experience in the industry (and they were all hiring 
). After that, teams were drawn to present their applications. Each team got up and used the projector to demonstrate their applications to the crowd and judges. There were some great applications up there, including a phone-based translator, an application that tracked and invoiced support calls in real time, some apps that used a smartphone camera to search for product information online, and others. All in all there were 15 completed apps from all the teams at the event.
After everyone presented, the judges went off to deliberate. This was a great time to talk to other dev teams about their apps and exchange ideas on how the apps were implemented and what their plans for the apps were. The API sponsors also spent some time with the dev teams to exchange ideas and even approached a few teams to continue their work outside of the event. When the judges returned, they awarded the prizes – $200 apple store gift cards for 4th, 5th, and 6th, a kindle and gift card for 3rd, a iPad 2 for 2nd, and a macbook air for 1st! At the end of the day, we won 3rd place with our “PitStops” web application. The day ended with a wrap up party at a local pub.
The HackVAN event was a great time, and I hope to bring the same experience to the HackREGINA event on March 17th. You can register for the event now by going to http://hackregina2012.eventbrite.com/. Hope to see you there!
YellowPages is a HackDays Champion, HackVAN registration open
A huge round of applause for YellowPages – they’ve stepped up to be the HackDays Champion sponsor for the HackVan event. We’re talking to lots of other great companies about being part of this event – get in touch if you want to be a part of it.
We’ve also put up our Eventbrite registration page. If you want to take part, go and sign up now. I guarantee you that this event will sell out.
The main thing we’re looking for is a venue. My company, iQmetrix, is the organizing sponsor and we originally thought we could fit everyone into our office, since we hold a lot of meetups here. But after talking to Leila and her plans to GO BIG with a 100 developers participating, we knew we needed bigger space.
Does your organization or an organization you know of have space for 100 developers, their laptops, and a spare corner to keep some beer and snacks? Get in touch!
For the rest of you, register for HackVan 2012. Here are the important dates:
Friday, March 23rd: Mixer Mingle Meet and Greet – meet other developers that will be participating, share ideas, find a partner. A chance for the rest of the Vancouver community to join us and get excited by the day ahead. Don’t stay out too late, you’ve got to program tomorrow!
Saturday, March 24th: API Hack Day – you’ll spend the entire day writing code solo or in small groups, integrating with our API sponsors, getting fed great food, and then being judged and winning prizes.
Registration Open for HackREGINA
The registration for our first HackREGINA event is now open! We’re excited to engage the developer community and see what you guys can come up with. The cost per developer is $10.
I’d also like to take this time to point our our sponsorship opportunities. We are currently looking for both API Sponsors and Community Sponsors for our event.
Opportunities to get involved with HackDays include:
- $250 - API Sponsorship - your API will be included for the HackDays event, link to your documentation and application examples, opportunity to present your API to all developers the day of the hackathon
- $500 - Community Sponsorship - As we do, you believe in supporting and growing the developer community in Regina. We will include your company information on the HackDays site, sponsorship mentions, and work with you to make your HackDays participation all it can be.
- $1000 - Party or Food Sponsorship - Opportunity to speak with the developer community and all attendees during either the pre-party on Friday or the hackathon wrap up presentation and evening.
If you’re interested in the API or Community Sponsorships, buy the tickets listed. For any other sponsorship opportunity please contact us directly.
Announcing HackTO!
Our 2012 hackathons are in full gear! HackVAN and HackRegina are being organized as we speak and registration should open this week. Grab your spots! We are looking at HackVAN attracting 100 developers this time around – and that will make for an awesome hackathon and competition. For Regina, it will be our first time in the city and we are looking forward to connecting with everyone in the tech and start up scene. So if you are interested in getting involved or just want to learn more about HackDays, get in touch!
We initially planned to organize a small HackTO hackathon on February 18 but we now have the opportunity to make our first HackTO a LARGE hackathon and to do we are postponing our HackTO to April. So please mark your calendar for HackTO The Awesome Hackathon (!). The skinny:
- HackTO (#2): Saturday April 14, 2012
- Start Time: 9 AM
- Location: TBD – but likely awesome new offices!
- Registration is now open.
Join us for the fun, the glory and the prizes: Mac BookAir, ipad, Kindle reader and more!
Hackdays hackathons are awesome gatherings of hackers/developers who work either in a team or alone to build applications with publicably available APIs. HackDays started with HackTO(#1) in Toronto and had such a great time that we rolled out HackDays across Canada thanks to an incredible sponsorship from the YellowPages. Our first destination outside of Toronto was Montreal. hackMTL was a blast and the winners are enjoying their awesome prizes! We also wrapped HackOTT in Ottawa and HackWaterloo in Waterloo and are now looking forward to helping anyone across Canada interested in organzing a hackathon.
For HackMTL and HackOTT, we rounded up various public APIs from local tech startups and have made them available to local developers. We will be doing the same again for HackTO version 2!
Each HackDays API will be supported by someone totally familiar with the API (so you won’t be wasting time trying to find answers to your questions) and we will provide a great hacking environment with caffeeine, pizza, snacks and prizes (and glory)! Working in teams or solo–and with expert guidance from our API sponsors–developers compete to create the coolest application using one or more of the available APIs. And just to make things interesting, this is all done in a few hours!
If you’re with either a technology company, a start up or a non profit organization that you think ought to be involved, or if you have any questions, drop us an email would love to hear from you.
BTW this is an all day event; breakfast, lunch and snacks provided! Our schedule will look something like this:
- 9:00 – Breakfast and introductions: Meet your HackDays organizers and all the developers, get acquainted with the space + final schedule + grab a breakfast of champions!
- 9:30 – API presentation: learn about the APIs available. Each API provider will have 5 minutes to introduce their API, discuss its salient features and get you excited about using it.
- 10:15 – Open Planning: come up with hacking idea and build a team. This is a white board exercise: if you have an idea that you would like to work on, just put its name down on the white board; if you are looking to build a team, identify yourself to other developers with the skill sets that you need. If you are looking for ideas, identify yourself to other developers as well.
- 10:30 – Hacking setup and start. You claim a little spot of the office with your team or by yourself and start working on your project. All the API providers will be on hand the entire day to provide support.
- Noon – Lunch
- 1:00 – Continue hacking – help yourself to all the energy snacks you need!
- 5:30 – Application presentation – 3 minutes for each presenter!
- 6:30 – Judging and prizes
- 7:00 – Off to nearby pub for celebrations!
HackTO is made possible by the incredible support from YellowPages.
Awesome API sponsors include: Context.io, FreshBooks, TinEye, YellowPages.
Register now. Our hackathon always sell out!
Save the date for HackREGINA and HackVAN
Hi! Consider this post your “save the date” entry for the HackREGINA and HackVAN events.
What are these events about? In short, these will be one day events where developers work alone or in teams to build applications that use the HackDays sponsor APIs to build interesting apps. The best apps win great prizes. Want more details? Read the kick off post from last year.
I’m Boris Mann, and I’ll be your host for the HackVAN event, and Chad McCallum will be hosting HackREGINA.
Last year, Chad participated as part of a winning team in HackVAN and I was involved as a judge. This year, we wanted to get more heavily involved. We also both work for iQmetrix, which will be participating as an API sponsor for the very first public release of our API.
Chad in the meantime has moved back to Regina, where he’s going to lead the charge in pulling together Regina’s first hackathon
For HackVAN, we’re looking to make it a lot bigger than the year before. That’s the first ask: if you’ve got a space that can fit 80 – 100 developers and their laptops, contact us!
Want to get involved in either HackREGINA or HackVAN as a sponsor, API provider, or help out with organizing? Leave a comment to get in touch.
For now, follow the blog to stay up to date, and save the date!
HackDays Toronto: the social good version!
Happy new year hackers and developers! We wrapped up 2011 with HackVan and are now ready to open HackDays 2012 with the first hackathon happening in Toronto. Hope you are ready to sharpen up your coding and hacking skills because this hackathon is just a couple of weeks away! In the coming weeks we will publish a full HackDays schedule for 2012 but in the meantime, here is the skinny:
- HackDays date: Saturday February 11, 2012
- Start Time: 9 AM
- Location: Klick Health offices, 175 Bloor St. East
- Registration is now open.
This hackathon is going to combine two great things: APIs + Social Media for Good to build applications that can change the world around us. And we would like you to join us for the fun, the glory and the prizes: Mac BookAir, ipad, Kindle reader and more!
Hosted at Klick Health, developers, hackers, designers and anyone interested in hacking for social good are invited to participate in this Hackathon. The idea is to build a social good application using APIs of your choice.
Hackdays hackathons are awesome gatherings of hackers/developers who work either in a team or alone to build applications with publicably available APIs. HackDays started with HackTO in Toronto and had such a great time that we rolled out HackDays across Canada. Our first destination outside of Toronto was Montreal. hackMTL was a blast and the winners are enjoying their awesome prizes! We also wrapped HackOTT in Ottawa and HackWaterloo in Waterloo and are now looking forward to helping anyone across Canada interested in organzing a hackathon.
This Social Good Hackathon organized by HackDays will be hosted by Klick Health and will be part of Toronto Social Media Week.
For HackMTL and HackOTT, we rounded up various public APIs from local tech startups and have made them available to local developers. We will be doing the same for this Social Good Hackathon except that this time around we are introducing a prize for the best application developed using a non-profit organization’s API in addition to one of the HackDays APIs and/or any other API(s) of your choosing.
Each HackDays API will be supported by someone totally familiar with the API (so you won’t be wasting time trying to find answers to your questions) and we will provide a great hacking environment with caffeeine, pizza, snacks and prizes (and glory)! Working in teams or solo–and with expert guidance from our API sponsors–developers compete to create the coolest application using one or more of the available APIs. And just to make things interesting, this is all done in a few hours!
If you’re with either a technology company or a non profit organization that you think ought to be involved, or if you have any questions, drop us an email would love to hear from you.
BTW this is an all day event; breakfast, lunch and snacks provided! Our schedule will look something like this:
- 9:00 – Breakfast and introductions: Meet your HackDays organizers and all the developers, get acquainted with the space + final schedule + grab a breakfast of champions!
- 9:30 – API presentation: learn about the APIs available. Each API provider will have 5 minutes to introduce their API, discuss its salient features and get you excited about using it.
- 10:15 – Open Planning: come up with hacking idea and build a team. This is a white board exercise: if you have an idea that you would like to work on, just put its name down on the white board; if you are looking to build a team, identify yourself to other developers with the skill sets that you need. If you are looking for ideas, identify yourself to other developers as well.
- 10:30 – Hacking setup and start. You claim a little spot of the office with your team or by yourself and start working on your project. All the API providers will be on hand the entire day to provide support.
- Noon – Lunch
- 1:00 – Continue hacking – help yourself to all the energy snacks you need!
- 5:30 – Application presentation – 3 minutes for each presenter!
- 6:30 – Judging and prizes
- 7:00 – Off to nearby pub for celebrations!
This Social Good Hackathon is made possible by Klick Health and HackDays.
Awesome API sponsors include: Context.io, FreshBooks, TinEye, YellowPages.
Register now. Our hackathon always sell out!