Hack24 in Nottingham

A couple of weeks ago Vivan and I packed our bags to head to Nottingham for Hack24, a weekend hackathon held by Tech Nottingham. We were looking forward to seeing what inventive uses of Pusher a crowd of 100+ hackers could come up with in a short space of time.

Hack24 was held in the incredible Nottingham Council House (Cronofy have some great pictures of the venue in their blog post on the event) which provided a picturesque setting for all to relax and work on their hacks.

The Pusher Prize

The winners of the Sphero Ollies were Big Crane who used Pusher to control a physical crane from an Android application. Their project was designed to help people get started with programming and puzzle solving; users gave the crane instructions in order to get a set of cubes from one position into another.

Not only did they create a fantastic hack, their submission video also featured some fantastic music and was really well made. We highly recommend watching this with the volume up!

Pushing Big Crane to a close finish was “Byte your Matez”. Besides the excellent “Byte” pun this team impressed by using Pusher as their communication platform to send data to multiple Android devices at once for their real life Zombie game. Players have to avoid being hunted by Zombies, and all their locations are shown in realtime on the application.

You can find their submission video below:

Huge congratulations to all the teams that competed in not only the Pusher prize but across all the sponsor challenges, the quality was fantastic and all the judges found it really tough. You can find a round up of the weekend and some of the highlight hacks on the Hack24 blog.

The standard of hacks was really high, and choosing just one winner was a tough decision. It was fantastic to get outside of London and meet people from the tech community in Nottingham which is clearly growing stronger and stronger.