2nd Place winner in Facebook SoCal Hackathon

This weekend I went to the FaceBook SoCal Regional Hackathon. All schools in the Southern California region participated including: UCLA, UCSD, UCI, USC, and other schools. I decided I wanted to build an iPhone app that used the camera to take a selfie, remove the background and replace it with a bunch of different images, then play the selfie song.

After a few hours of working by myself I thought it would be more fun to work with a team. So I joined up with 2 strangers, Pritika and Sonal who happen to be undergrads at UCSD. I noticed these two girls working on an iPhone app, so I decided to help them out. They had an idea to build an app the would pull videos from Vine and show the user the dance moves involved in that vine. We started working on this iPhone app, and I got the vine videos unofficial API working, but we quickly found out that none of use were that fluent in iOS. At 12:00 midnight we scrapped the idea to make an iPhone app and instead made a web app. We made the web app, pulled the videos, updated our design and made a final product.

DanceSea

We went around and had people film Vines in order to have some content on our site.

During Demo time, there were 33 teams to present their hack, and we were one of the first to go up. It’s always a disadvantage to go first because 30 presentations, and no one remembers the first few.

After we demoed, we saw some pretty Amazing hacks, and knew we weren’t going to win. However when they started naming the winners, they said “In Second Place, we chose this hack because some of us need the help when it comes to dancing” and we knew we were the only dancing hack, so we all looked at each other in shock. “DanceSea! Come on up you’ve won second place!” We had no idea what happened, but we ended up taking second place!
For prizes, we got Spheros which is a robotic toy that rolls around with a remote control.

The first place winners were from UCI and won a trip to the Facebook finals hackathon, and an honorable mention for another UCI team quicklinks which helped send links in Facebook messenger using a Chrome Extension.

Had a great time hacking!