In the weekend of 17-19 of October I’ve been to a Hackathon here in Timisoara. It was called HackTM and it was the first edition. It was supposed to be a 48 hour hackathon, but due to some logistic problems it turned into 32 hours. It was organized by various people from the tech scene here and sponsors were major tech companies. I’m not going to list them all here, I’m hear to talk about my experience there. If you want more details head over to their website.

###The atmosphere I was nice to see that so many developers have come to try and build something useful to them, the community or just wanted to learn something. The projects included: robots, home automation systems, health systems, apps that used open-data and many more. Even though the were prizes involved, when someone was in a pickle others from different teams tried to help out. That’s what I like about these events. You get together and even though you try and win, it’s ultimately about meeting new people, learning new things and socializing.

###What I made Even though everybody made something complex, I kept it simple. All I wanted to make was a 500px Manager for Windows Phone. 500px is a Photography Hosting Service. It lets you comment, rate and share your photos. It’s free, but you do have limitations (20 uploads/week), but if you decide to pay a subscription you get unlimited uploads, statistics, custom domain support and you’ll be able to create an online portfolio. They also have a public developer API, that developers can use to create apps that can manage a users photographs.

Being an amateur photographer myself I do have a 500px account. I’ve also recently bought a Lumia 925 and I was truly amazed on how much phone cameras have came along. Sure it’s no match for the big DSLR, but in some cases, when the light is just perfect, you can get a decent DSLR level photo out of it.

Currently the app is heavily bugged, but the core functionality (photo management) is there.

I’ll write a full blog post on it later.

###Final thoughts Well then, I haven’t won any prizes this time, but I did had a good time and I’ll certainly be coming back next year. If there are hackathons organized in or around your area, you should definately check them out. They’re awesome.

Until next time!