Compute Midwest Hackathon 2014

Originally published on the Clarify.io blog. View archived copy.

I’ve just come home from the two day Compute Midwest hackathon in Kansas City. It was cold enough that I considered giving this post the title “Why I Love Living in Texas”.

But enough complaining. This was one of the best hackathons we’ve sponsored this year. Great venue, great teams, and great hacks.

Truth be told, the venue was odd for a hackathon — a medical marketing company in a building owned by an insurance company — but the corporate setting ended up working really well:

• Each team had their own conference / meeting room;
• The cafeteria was a perfect communal meeting spot;
• The presentation area was big enough for everyone;
• The A/V system was modern; and
• It was quiet! (I’m not a big fan of the thumpy-thump music so popular at these events.)

At the end of the weekend, 13 teams presented their hacks. These are my favorites.

A team called vUp built a drag-and-drop container building facility for developers using Vagrant and Docker. The aim was to make it easy for developers to emulate their production environment by dragging and dropping pre-configured containers from a palette onto an environment canvas and then hooking them up to each other. Pretty cool. But their stated goal — coming soon! — will include a system to package up the whole configuration and push it to a hosted environment. That would be sweet. I wonder, is DevOps becoming too much fun. What’s next? Gamification?

FitPay created a system to pay for in-app purchases using step credits from your fitness tracker. Clever idea. As they said: “If you want a bigger gun, go out for a run.” Somehow they even had time to build a hungry monkey game over the weekend. Buy the monkey bananas by exercising!

The winner of the Best in Show prize was a team called AirBrush. They used computer vision software to track a pen. They transmitted the pen’s coordinates to an online canvas. A companion Android app allowed them to change the pen color and drop clip art onto the canvas using voice commands. Naturally. And because that wasn’t enough, the canvas was collaborative, so up to three people could draw at the same time. A few years ago this would have been someone’s MIT PhD thesis.

My personal favorite — which therefore won the Clarify prize: $500 worth of Lego! — was a team called Catchkey. Their app was a phone-based, automated, first-round technical interviewing system. They used the Twilio API to ask potential candidates a list of technical questions and recorded their answers. Those answers were then passed to Clarify’s API so that they could be checked for relevant keywords. The keywords were then used to grade the candidate’s answer.

 

Their prototype went way beyond what I expected when they first presented their idea. It was multi-tenant — i.e., it could be used by more than one company or department at once — and multi-user so any number of candidates could take the test in parallel. And they included a management dashboard that allowed employers to write questions, terms they expected to hear in the answer, and the number of terms necessary to pass the candidate’s answer. The dashboard also allowed a hiring manager to review the recording and override the automated scores. And the cherry on the cake was an automated SMS notification system to let the candidate know whether or not to expect a followup interview. The implementation was a bit harsh, but I can imagine its being elegantly integrated into a calendaring system.

The hackathon organizers did a fantastic job with a nice assist from the venue hosts, InTouch Solutions.

Clarify was joined by Twilio, ContextIO, and Garmin whose APIs were also used to great effect.