Hack Manchester

‘Fast-track application* for each member of the winning team to a paid 2014 summer internship at Barclays global technology centre in Knutsford, Cheshire.  12 week contract worth over £5000 each.’

Each applicant would be guaranteed an interview but would need to successfully complete an interview and all recruitment checks required by law to undertake the role.

Mobile and Social go hand in hand, add in a plethora of problems and challenges that we all encounter as we visit new exciting destinations and explore - and you’ve got yourself a challenge!!

We want to see what weird and whacky ideas 24 hours and sleep deprivation can dream up .. using mobile and social to help make any aspect of travel that little bit easier and fun.

We will also supply a CSV of lots of hotel goodness for you to use (if you want to) so that you can plug some hotel content into the mix…

http://datafeed.laterooms.com/Hotels.zip

Prize

4 x 1 night stay for 2 on B&B (valid for a year – on request) at H10 London Waterloo - http://www.laterooms.com/en/hotel-reservations/194633_h10-london-waterloo-london.aspx

Hack Manchester Challenge

Hello! We’re ao.com!

13 years ago a business was born, alongside one man’s vision to ‘change the face of the white goods industry’.

Today ao.com provides a third of all kitchen appliances sold within the UK, making over a million deliveries each year… and shows no signs of slowing down!

So how do we do it? 

Simple really, we function around one focus… Happiness. A happy workforce makes for happy customers and happy suppliers!….  Throw in a highly creative working environment with plenty of space for play, and you’ve got a lot of talent caring enough to make all our customers smile!

This year we were awarded 4th spot in The Times Top 100 UK companies to work for, topping last year’s spot at No. #5.

Our restless pursuit for ‘bigger and better’ has led to ao.com becoming a market-leading retail business with Information Technology and Software Development, at its core. 

Our business is run on bespoke software and strategically integrated software products, allowing us to react to opportunities faster than our competitors, understand our customers better and push the boundaries of the possible from great… to awesome.

The Challenge

“Hack days and Hackathon’s are a ridiculous amount of fun (well we think so anyway). What we want you to build for us is the ultimate software companion for a team participating in this kind of event. Think of it as the ultimate dashboard/intelligent agent that provides you with information about what’s going on in your team, and what’s going on in the wider Hackathon.

At ao.com, our mission statement contains the line, “everything we do revolves around happiness” and so we’re going to judge the entries on how happy they make us. The qualities we’re going to be looking for (that make us happy) are:

• Innovation of idea/concept – the more useful the better
• How engaging the app is, especially its inherent humour/comedy
• Technical mastery, behind the scenes in the technologies you employ but also in the design and user experience of the application.

Wehope that all of you are creative enough to really run with this idea and have a massive amount of fun building it, but in case you need some help, here are a few ideas we thought might help you along…

• Stream the timeline of Hackathon goings on from social media sites
• Provide build metrics like how many lines of code, test coverage, build status etc
• Team or conference chat function, possibly with a software agent that can help with team activities
• Alert team members when it’s time to take a break, hold another planning session etc
• Locate errant team members when they’ve wandered off for a break and you need their code”

The Prizes

Apart from winning the competition we want to make sure the winners are rewarded for their dedication to development and for taking 24 hours out of their time to compete.

The four lucky winners will walk home with their own array of gifts from ao.com

These include 4 brand new mini ipads, 4 Tassimo desktop coffee machines by Bosch and lots of ao swag!

Layershift are a Manchester based managed hosting provider, giving you a safe and reliable home for all of your web projects. Layershift take care of the server stuff for you, so you can focus 100% of your energy on the exciting bit (your code, your business, your customers).

Layershift’s revolutionary Jelastic PaaS provides each developer with their own exclusive server stack catering for Java or PHP projects. Combine these with powerful 1-click load balancing, horizontal scaling, and a unique automatic vertical scaling feature, and you have an incredibly versatile platform ready to power your next project.

Layershift are providing exclusive free application hosting for all Hack Manchester competitors during the competition, with bonus prizes on offer for the best application developed and hosted on their platform. It’s important to use tools that you’re familiar with during a hackathon, so you can experiment with the platform right now.

Learn more at http://www.layershift.com/hackmanchester

Video from the weekend is available here:

https://bitly.com/hackmanchester

So that was Hack Manchester! We really hope you enjoyed yourself. We’re going to update the blog with the hacks - stuff from the judges. Loads!

Thanks so much for coming and making the event. You really blew us away with what you created. Having to sit down and just take it all in.

Check out this Storify - capturing the buzz in the lead-up to Hack Manchester getting started today!

http://storify.com/intechnica/hack-manchester-underway

Hello folks - just wanted to give more details on Intechnica’s Hack Manchester challenge. The prize is four Raspberry Pi computers (the Model B variation).

The Bacon Number Challenge Details

The Intechnica Challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to write a system that generates the Bacon Number for any actor. 

Google recently implemented a search feature that can reveal an actor’s “bacon number” (or degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, for those who don’t know) in typical Google sub-second response times. But can you out-bacon Google? Making use of the Amazon Web Services tool set, we want to see who can create an app to find specific, complex data from the Internet Movie Database the fastest and most accurately! 

See the wiki entry for more details about Bacon Numbers. 

The rules

All results must be based on the imdb dataset that can be downloaded here. 

The system you produce must use the tools available in the Amazon Web Services system and be hosted on an EC2 medium size machine (or smaller). We have created test accounts and have credits available kindly supplied by Amazon for this event. Please ask one of the Intechnica chaps for details or if you are not familiar with AWS and you would like some pointers. 

The system produced must accept a query string in the format ?q=actor_name and return a json object in the following format

{
    "baconNumber": 2,
    "steps": [
        {"actor": "Johnny Depp", "appearedWith": "Helena Bonham Carter", "appearedIn":"Dark Shadows"},
        { "actor": "Helena Bonham Carter", "appearedWith": "Kevin Bacon", "appearedIn": "Novocaine" }
    ] 
}

Judging will be done using the Test Page. In the event of a tie break the speed of response will be used as the deciding factor. [hint : this will include round trip time so build everything in eu-west region on AWS]

If you need any assistance, please tweet us @intechnica or come and find our judge Andy, who will be around for the full 24 hours.

Happy hacking!

Alex, Intechnica

Hi guys. Rich from Pusher here, I’ll be at the hack this weekend some come and say hello. I’ll be wearing my Pusher t-shirt so you can easily pick me out from the crowd. I just thought I’d give you a nudge towards using Pusher..!

BTW I might tweet a few things during the hack, so follow me at @rich_caudle if you like!

What can I make with Pusher?

Here’s a few use cases that Pusher is great for:

• Notifications - simple realtime notifications making users aware that new data is available, data has changed, a new comment has been made… (you get the idea)
• User interactions - e.g. realtime chat between users who are viewing the same piece of information or visualisation
• Collaboration - e.g. multiple users working together to compose a melody
• Visualisations - This requires some realtime data, but it’s amazing how realtime visualisations can even make Justin Bieber interesting
• Multiplayer Games - gaming is all about user interaction and immersing users in engaging gameplay. With a touch of real-time interaction this game has become massively popular and highly addictive -http://wordsquared.com
• Go Off-piste! - Pusher isn’t limited to just browser and mobile applications. Why not get your soldering iron out?

Why should I use Pusher?

Pusher is great at hack days as you can base a fiendishly ambitious project entirely upon it, but equally you can use Pusher to add some magic to any application.

You can add Pusher to your project in only a few lines of code and it’s extremely quick to pick up. You’ll really quickly notice the power and simplicity of our platform and it’ll give you the edge over the competition.

Pusher is also a very complementary API. We provide that last-mile delivery of data from the server to clients. This means that we work really well with other datasets and APIs like Twilio, DataSift, SoundCloud, Superfeedr,Twitter and many more.

I’m almost sold…

We’re offering a ‘Best Use of Pusher’ prize for the hack. The winner will get a free 6 months of our startup plan (worth $300), and an Apple TV.

All you need to do now is win me over with your amazing hack!

Hello!

Hack Manchester is a mere 2 days away and we’re so excited to see everyone at the museum for a weekend of ridiculous fun, great company and amazing hacks.

Stay tuned for updates here about details of the day, cool things happening in the science festival, and details of the hacks submitted.

Happy hacking,
The Hack Manchester Team