London WebSummit Hackday

Last weekend we sponsored and attended London WebSummit Hackday. This followed on from last year’s very successful API Hackday so there was a lot to live up to. Amit Jotwani from Mashery took the organisational lead and we sponsored along with Paymill, PeerIndex, Twilio and SendGrid.

The event took place at Modern Jago, Microsoft’s trendy backspace in Shoreditch and was attended by around 80 hackers, resulting in 13 or so hacks.

We didn’t need to incentivise people too much to use our API. They know the happy feeling it gives.

. @pusher guarantees happy feeling. #lwshackday twitter.com/amit/status/30…

— Amit Jotwani (@amit) March 2, 2013

Lots of the hacks used our API and we’ll continue to work with the developers following the event to help them finish off their integrations and applications. Here are our picks from the event.

Sonify everything

Sonify is an engine for streaming midi data to browsers from a ‘musician’ server using Pusher.

It was developed by Hugh Rawlinson who is a student of Music Computing. Hugh’s app grabs midi data from any other type of data and uses Pusher to instantly send the notes to be played to any connected device. The app currently grabs data from SMS using Twilio, data from PeerIndex, and various other data using Mashery APIs. Hugh plans to Sonify Sports Scores next!

Realtime data is frequently represented in a simple textual form. So, it was great to see how easily Hugh could instantly broadcast the alternative representation of the data using Pusher. The effect this created – with so many different machines instantly playing the midi notes – was great to hear and see, and definitely made this one of the best hacks of the event. In fact, it came in joint runner up!

#lwshackday Sonify Everything uses @pusher, @mashery @twilio @peerindex, node.js, jquery, bootstrap, and midi.js. USE ALL THE APIS!!!!!! :D

— Hugh Rawlinson (@hughrawlinson) March 2, 2013

Paymill Realtime dashboard

Realtime web technologies were pioneered in finance and they are still very applicable in that space. Realtime financial dashboards can help companies instantly spot trends – giving them the opportunity to react. So, it was exciting to see the ease at which Tom Arnfeld could hook Paymill’s WebHooks into Pusher to create a realtime visualisation of transactions within an application.

Image coming soon… and Tom also plans to open source the application.

Congratulations to Tom. And it was great to see the Paymill folks over in London. We look forward to hooking up again soon.

Won some AWESOME prizes from @paymill and @pusher at #LWSHackday today!!

— Tom Arnfeld (@tarnfeld) March 2, 2013

Overall Winner: GiveNow

GiveNow once again showed Pusher and Paymill integration, but this time for instant charity donations. The results of the donations where shown in a simple activity stream. The PeerIndex API was also used to find influential friends who you could tweet to and ask them to also Give Now.

GiveNow was developed by our latest recruit, Alexander Schuch, and his friend Matthias Leitner who works at Geckoboard. We obviously couldn’t give them the Pusher prize. So it was great that Alex and Matthias were such unanimous winners with the rest of the judges, walking away with a flying drone, Kindle Fires, an iPad mini and Amazon vouchers.

Great to have you on board the Pusher train, Alex!

Big thanks to @paymill, @pusher and PeerIndex. Won some awesome prizes at #lwshackday today. /cc @matthiasleitner

— Alexander Schuch (@schuchalexander) March 2, 2013

References

• Paymill write-up
• Mashery Write-up – Humanity Hackathons
• PeerIndex write-up
• Video of the event