TADHack Chicago 2015

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

This past weekend was the first TADhack Chicago. Being in the API space, we attend a good number of hackathons everywhere from London to Seattle but this one had a few unique things that made it stand out.

First, there was a robot. Not just some silly Roomba roaming the floor doing it’s thing but a legitimate robot doing super productive tasks like the Macarena. What more could you want?

The robot was the top prize from Matrix which serves as an open standard for decentralized communications via HTTP APIs. It’s geared for WebRTC signaling and IoT scenarios.

The robot itself is from Trossen. Click the image for a larger view.

 

Next were the sponsors. This is one of the few times each year this group of companies come together and try to solve interesting problems. It’s great to see the collaboration and information sharing that happens outside the more formal environments of conference presentations, meetings, etc. This is how the real work in our industries get done: Smart people talking about the challenges they’ve faced and beaten.

 

Finally, there were some great demos.

NextGen 911 was a fun project that could have some real-world applications. It was a simple Apple Watch app that monitored your heart rate and sent notifications via Slack, SMS, and Skype if the rhythm changed in unexpected ways. Done well, this could be useful in a number of scenarios. I’d love to see if they take it further.

And then there was Thomas Howe who built Guber Conference using us and Tropo. I could describe it, but the video demo is way more descriptive:

We’re already looking forward to the people and challenges that come out of the next one. Of course, Keith will be going then because Chicago is cold!