2nd Place at CBS Hackathon!

Every year CBS has a hackathon and I wanted to participate in it this year. Originally I was going to build a browser plugin for myself to find Kelley Blue Book prices for Craigslist cars, but I didn’t know if this was the appropriate medium for that type of hack. Instead we all had a brain storming meeting so that we could come up with ideas. My idea was to use the Javascript Browser to track the usage of users on our sites since we had a javascript file on most of our partner sites, however this may slow down the customers site, so we wouldn’t be able to use it on partner sites. Maybe just something locally. The other ideas were to create ads calls on our partner pages, a game to create content, and finally the winning idea which was to create a browser plugin to to track the price of recent items that you viewed. This was something we all liked, and I liked it because it was a browser plugin which is what I wanted to work on anyway.

The people who participated were Oleg, Prakash, Prashanth and Eli. So we made some mock ups, came up with ideas on how to implement it and we broke down the tasks for each person. I was in charge of implementing the message handling between scripts, Oleg was in charge of building the backend, Prashanth designed the html look, and Prakash would scrape each page to get the price, manufacturer and part number.

We worked for a good 13 hours straight, and finished around 11:00PM. This was the fastest I’d ever finished a hack for a hackathon, but it probably helped that 4 engineers were continuously working on it.

The next day, I presented while Oleg manned the demo. We had 4 minutes to present, which is a long time for a hackathon. I was used to doing 2 minutes. I presented in partly 2 minutes, and showed off all the features. Everything went well, no bugs. Then we watched all the other hacks. There were some pretty cool hacks. The one I liked was called Rivr, and it a synced spotify app that would have people vote to skip a song and everyone could listen at the exact same time.

After all the hacks were done we went to lunch as the judges talked. When we came back we received the email, and we won 2nd place! I was really surprised because there were a lot of good hacks. I think the ones with business potential were the ones that took the cake, because the judges were executives of the company. We won GoPros. Rivr won 5th place and won Jawbone UPs which is actually what I was hoping to get cause I was going to buy one this summer anyway.

In the end it was worth the effort, and I learned a lot about how to better structure a Javascript application from working with my CoWorkers.