The culture of hacking continues to bloom in New York, evidenced last weekend by Columbia's DevFest 2012 (http://adicu.com/devfest2012). DevFest is entirely student run, and had workshops and support from local VC firms and startups. The event culminated with presentations of hacks and awards judged by Fred Wilson (http://www.avc.com/) (USV), Chris Wiggins (http://www.columbia.edu/~chw2/) (HackNY), Dave Jagoda (http://a16z.com/) (Andreeson Horowitz), Ryan Bubinski (http://ryanbubinski.com/) (Codecademy) and myself (https://twitter.com/#!/tarikh) (Uncommon Projects). A full list of the winners is below.
DevFest and the entire developer scene has really blossomed since I covered (http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/08/nyc-hack-devfest/) last year's event. To wit: HackNY (http://hackny.org/) hosted its successful Raise Cache (http://raisecache.com/) event, NYHacker (http://nyhacker.org/) organized Game (http://gamehackday.org/) and Music (http://nyc.musichackday.org/2011/) Hackdays, Foursquare hosted its first (http://aboutfoursquare.com/best-of-the-foursquare-hack-day/) and second (http://blog.foursquare.com/2011/09/28/announcing-the-global-hackathon-winners/) (global) hackathon, we saw our first Art Hackday (http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/art-hack-day/), New York Tech Meetup (http://nytm.org/) launched Hack of the Month, Etsy continued its awesome Code as Craft (http://codeascraft.etsy.com/) lecture series, students launched the Hacker league (http://hackerleague.org/) platform, GroupMe (TC Hackathon 2010) got acquired (http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/21/skype-to-acquire-year-old-group-messaging-service-groupme/) and Docracy (http://www.docracy.com/) (TC Hackathon 2011) got funded just to name a few developments. All this hacking is a huge win for New York because hacking leads to so much innovation – recently Eric Ries argued (http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2012/02/hacker-way.html) that the culture hacking and continuous development may be a new way of doing business and the heart of Facebook's success.
But back to the kids. There were tons of great hacks – from a student presenting her very first hack (http://cook-nooks.appspot.com/), a crowd-srouced mobile marketplace for buying parking spots (http://www.parkally.com/) and the winning task manager by Sid Nair (http://hackerleague.org/users/sidnair09). Here's a list of them all.
Lerner (https://github.com/zhemao/lerner) -Best use of the Twilio API - Zhehao (Howie) Mao
Beer Battle (http://hackerleague.org/hackathons/devfest/hacks/beer-battle) - Best game - Augusto Corvalan, Andrew Funcheon, Trevor Marshall, Moses Nakamura, and Andrew Stenvall
ParkAlly (http://www.parkally.com/) – Best pre-existing app - Sid Shanker, Mason Silber, and Zach Reitano
Situity (http://signup.situity.com/?r=http://adicu.com/devfest2012) – Best UI design - Alex Golec, Calvin Hu, Simon McGown, George Valdes, Ming Norman Tsui, and David Zhai
CookNooks (http://cook-nooks.appspot.com/) – Best first hack - Sophie Chou
FreeSeat (http://hackerleague.org/hackathons/devfest/hacks/freeseat) – Most technically difficult - Aditya Mukerjee and Zach Newman
ResearchMatch (http://devfest.herokuapp.com/) – Best business model - Yifan Li, Ryder Moody, Alex Poon, and Rebecca Sealfon
HelpRoom (http://hackerleague.org/hackathons/devfest/hacks/helproom) – Overall 3rd - Dina Lamdany and Elie Toubiana
omnified (http://hackerleague.org/hackathons/devfest/hacks/omnified) – Overall 2nd - Yufei Liu
Scheduler (http://hackerleague.org/hackathons/devfest/hacks/scheduler) – Overall 1st - Sid Nair
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