Hack&Roll '12 Wrapup
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Hack&Roll 2012, which was organized by NUS Hackers ended on Monday and it saw 47 student developers hacking out cool stuff in 24 hours, applying a vast range of technology stacks, from the standard LAMP stack, to node.js to Ruby on Rails. In addition, the event also saw several industry players coming in to support the event, including Research in Motion, AWS, iDA, and Nokia.
The winning team, Team Semantics 2, was a group of 2 students who built a UAV in 24 hours. They used the Justin.tv api, found that the screenshots API did not work, rejected a Flash-based approach and wrote a Selenium script to take screenshots of an open browser in their Linux computer. They then cropped the image programmatically. After which, they uploaded those screenshots via Dropbox to submit to face.com for face detection (this was after realizing that face.com needed a hosted image). Lastly, their plane crashed multiple times, after which they discovered they had accidentally reversed the polarity of their engine.
The team that came up second was just as impressive. Team 113 wrote a scraper for SoC modules, wrote a parser for the scraped data (to build a dependency tree for modules in SoC), wrote a web app to serve that data, used MongoDB to store that data, and then learnt HTML5 canvas within the 24 hours to animate the graph structure of the modules.
The talent that was brimming at the event, was simply exciting, and the apps produced by the participants were just pure amazing, given that they had did it within 24 hours (See the list of apps here). Not only that, they had prominent individuals within the hacker scene in Singapore dropping by the event as well, including all 3 founders of HackerspaceSG.
The event ended on Monday, with Lee Wee Sun (Vice Dean of Undergraduate Studies of SoC), Erwan Mace (Google), Sarim Aziz(RIM), Chua Ruiwen (HackerspaceSG), Luther Goh (HackerspaceSG) and Justin Lee (HackerspaceSG) judging the various submissions.
