We’ve got some good news and bad news. Bad news first: we won’t be doing a summer hackathon 
.
Good news!: Our next hackathon will be a GAMECHANGER. We’ll be getting a 50/50 group of men and women together to hack on gaming! This is everything from mind controlled video games to virtual international travel to waking up in the morning to New York scavenger hunts.
We’ll have a evening prep event in September and then the hackathon will be October 4th-5th. Get ready!
We’re excited to be working with New York Tech Meetup, Control Group, and Girl Develop It, as well as other great partner organizations. We all bring a unique perspective to the table; together we can do even more. Signup here if you’re interested.
It’s official. Hack’n Jill is now one year old! It has been an incredible year for us, and we want to thank all of you for being such amazing supporters of the movement towards a more diverse tech community.
A year ago, we (Kara, Eugenia, Lauren, and Judy) were strangers to each other and to you. We were brought together by Aaron Smyth who thought we “might want to work on something for women in tech” and serendipitously, he was right.
In the beginning, we barely knew what we were doing; it took a month’s worth of weekly meetings just to decide our name. Rejected names include: Let’s Hack It out, Lady and the Hack, Hack to the Future, 50/50 Exception Committed, Sadie Hackins, and Affirmative Hacktion. Yes, these were the results of hours of brainstorming (but no, we don’t do brand consulting, so go ahead and put your checkbook away).
The rest, as they say, is her-story (that’s a pun).
1. Teamwork
Like an arranged marriage, sometimes the best matches are the ones that are chosen for you. For anyone who has worked on a team, you know how wrong it can go in so many ways. We have been so lucky to have stumbled onto each other. A year ago, we were a bunch of strangers with no experience in community building. Since then, we’ve disagreed productively, relied on each other, and learned along the way how to throw hackathons, happy hours, and twitter feuds.
2. Purpose
We don’t do Hack’n Jill for the money or the SXSW after parties—or because we can’t think of any other way to spend our nights and weekends. We do Hack’n Jill because we believe in it. We believe that a diverse team is happier and more productive. We believe that there are problems with the proportion and visibility of women in tech. We believe we can show the tech community something new.
3. Community
It’s a testimony to the NYC community that a new idea received so much support, especially at the beginning when there was no evidence that we would succeed. Our first partners (SendGrid, Twilio, AppNexus, Yodle, Microsoft, Temboo, Yipit, Boxee, Mashery, StackOverflow) hold a special place in our heart for believing in us. As we continue, we see more and more how enthusiastic and generous our community is.
With your help and support, we are so proud of what we’ve done this year.
We are so excited to be working with all of you. Thanks for your role in changing the world; you never cease to inspire us.
The best has yet to come.
We’re gearing up for a great year and hoping you’ll join us! Save the date for our upcoming events:
February 13, 2013 We’re taking you out! Please join for adult beverages, on us. Reconnect with your old hackathon team or meet your next team. Bar TBD.
April 16, 2013
Get tips and practice interview questions and whiteboard coding.
June 7-8, 2013
Our summer hackathon returns, this time hosted at Bloomberg HQ.
We had a great hackathon last month at Etsy with over 20 awesome hacks and we couldn’t have done it without the support of our sponsors. One of our biggest sponsors, Microsoft, sent two dev evangelists, Jesse Freeman and Maria Naggaga. They answered questions about Windows, gaming, and walked around helping with tech issues. They also brought backpacks, notebooks, pens, and a bevy of USB sticks pre-loaded with Windows 8.
Amit Jotwani, the awesome dev evangelist from Mashery, took some time off from helping people use the Mashery API and answering tech questions to check out Windows 8. He made an app called WinFlip that uses three apis in the Mashery network (USA Today, Rotten Tomatoes & Pearson) to show top movies, trending news, and images.
WinFlip shows recent news headlines with full articles from USA Today.
“Microsoft and Windows 8 are not always an obvious choice for use at hackathons. But I went for it and my app displays awesomely using the slick Metro UI introduced in Windows 8…I feel it’ll take people some time to get used to the new look and feel. Definitely a worthy competing OS from Microsoft”, said Amit.
WinFlip uses data from Rotten Tomatoes to show top movies.
We’ve noticed that many of our hackathon attendees come with Macbooks, a popular choice for devs who want to easily use their favorite open source stack. But we’ve been impressed with the direction of Windows 8, Metro, and the Windows App Store.
And it’s always good to have another player in the game so we’ve written up a quick guide for web developers on Macs to get started with Win 8 development.
1. Download Windows 8
If you don’t have dev evangelists roaming your house with usb sticks, you can download a Windows 8 Enterprise 90-day evaluation for free from the Microsoft website. You’ll have to give them some personal info and get a Microsoft account if you don’t already have one. Also keep in mind, it’s about 3.3 GB so depending on your internet speed, you might want to take a nap.
2. Install Windows 8
There are two options: use Bootcamp to dual boot or use virtualization software like Parallels, VMWare, or VirtualBox. We like to use VirtualBox because it’s free and we already downloaded it back when we were testing different versions of IE with this handy project. Follow these instructions for installing Windows 8 on VirtualBox.
3. Download and install Visual Studio 2012
From your new Windows 8 virtual machine, open up a web browser and go to this page. Click the “Download Now” button in the “Download the tools and SDK” section to download Visual Studio Express 2012, Blend, the Windows 8 SDK, and project templates.
4. Get a developer license
The first time you open Visual Studio 2012, it will prompt you to create a developer license. Just follow the instructions and sign in with your Microsoft account.
We’ll walk through the project structure and outline the plan to get real data from APIs in Mashery’s network; the WinFlip source code is available on GitHub for reference.
Grid App Template
Start a new project and pick Templates → Javascript → Grid App. It will generate a solution and a project (solutions can have multiple projects).
Hit the green arrow to run the app locally. You’ll see that the grid and detail pages are already set up. Use Alt+Tab to return to your Visual Studio window. Hit the orange stop button to stop.
The Grid App template starts us with three pages:
WinFlip pulls data from USA Today, Rotten Tomatoes & Pearson and makes each source a group. For example, Rotten Tomatoes is a group and an opening movie is an item in that group.
Mashery setup
Get a Mashery account. This will make it easy to get dev access to over 50 APIs. For example, to get a key for the Rotten Tomatoes API, first register by logging in with your Mashery account and filling out some info about your app.
Modify the templates
The project is like a typical web project with images , HTML, CSS, and Javascript. There are folders at the root level for site-wide js, css, and images. The pages folder contains 3 subfolders, one for each page. Each page has its own html, js, and css files. By convention, the names of these files are the same as the name of the folder.
/WinFlipApplication_TemporaryKey.pfx (Personal Information Exchange) is a certificate file for building and signing the app and /Package.appxmanifest identifies the app and what it does. The /References includes the Windows Library for Javascript. While it’s not strictly required, it provide things like ui controls, promises, dom utilities, and ajax helpers. If you do use it, you must add base.js first, then ui.js to your html page.
/default.html is loaded first and sets the home page to /pages/groupedItems/groupedItems.html:
<div id=”contenthost” data-win-control=”Application.PageControlNavigator”
data-win-options=”{home: ‘/pages/groupedItems/groupedItems.html’}”></div> |
/js/data.js contains sample data and helper methods for working with the data. Take a look at the generateSampleData function around line 59. To change the data in the app, we are going to replace sampleGroups and sampleItems with our own items. To minimize the changes we have to make, we will map properties from our dynamic sources to the properties in the templates, aka the properties in sampleGroups and sampleItems.
Check out this guide to adding data for more information about how data is stored, accessed, and bound to HTML elements. The sample data is synchronous by default but we will fetch the data asynchronously. We can add a lib like jQuery and call $.ajax in data.js. We can also use the WinJS library.
$.ajax({ url: 'http://api.rottentomatoes.com/api/public/v1.0/lists/movies/opening.json?apikey='+rottenTomtoesKey, dataType: "json", success: searchCallbackRotten }); |
Windows 8 apps are distributed through the Windows Store. You can read through the process of publishing an app or sign up for Generation App to get free app consultation, design & technical guidance, and more.
Microsoft was a sponsor of Hacksgiving and we are grateful for their support and generosity. They are committed to supporting diversity in tech with programs like Women at Microsoft and grants and scholarships for women and girls.
Wow, what a November.
After a hurricane, an election, and an amazing hackathon, it’s hard to believe it’s already Thanksgiving.
Before we make a quick trip down memory lane, we’d like to give an ENORMOUS THANK YOU to everyone—Jacks, Jills, volunteers, sponsors, partners, judges, mentors, guests and more—who made Hacksgiving a smashing success.
Mingling on Friday night before presentations
If you attended Hacksgiving, we’d really appreciate if you filled out our quick Hacksgiving survey. Enter your email at the end to participate in our drawing for a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Your feedback is infinitely valuable and lets us continue to learn and iterate. Thank you!
We’re thrilled to announce that Hacksgiving was 51% female.
You know what else is 51% female? The United States. Coincidence? Probably not.
Watching api presentations at Etsy on Friday night
Here at Hack’n Jill, we believe equal representation is the first step in building better products. We’ve set a new standard for the hackathon community, and are extremely grateful for everyone’s help in getting us to this point. We’re looking forward to helping other communities and events achieve the same ratio.
We hosted Hacksgiving at Etsy Labs in Dumbo, and we told lots of jokes, took funny pictures in their free photo booth, spent the night at NYU Poly, and ate amazing ice cream and donuts the size of our faces.
We also hacked. Check. Out. These. Projects. It was a tough decision for the judges, and for all of us, but here are the winners. To see all 18 submitted projects, check out our Hackerleage page.
Hacking overnight at NYU Poly
1st Place: Disaster Remote Response by Haris Amin and Raquel Hernandez
2nd Place: Reply for All by Courteney Ervin, Alec Turnbull, and Matthew Hamilton
People’s Choice: Tranquility by Grant Kot, Gene Demo, Bilal Quadri, Sharon Li, and Josh Greenman (check out the poetry they inspired on HN)
Microsoft: Win Flip by Amit Jotwani
Twilio: Disaster Remote Response
Sendgrid: StormSurge by Hannah Chen, Patrick Cushing, Nicole Dominguez, and Kevin Galligan
Mashery: RoomMatch by Alex Bisker, Alex P, and Lynda Wellhausen
Pearson: Voluntarily by Evie Borthwick, Ana Becker, Lauri Apple, and Alexandra Schieren
Behance: StormSurge
Spotify: Woof by Eric Ho and Stanley Wong
Thank you again to all our sponsors: Etsy, Microsoft, Pearson, Behance, Yodle, Twilio, SendGrid, Redhat, StackOverflow, Spotify, Mashery, 10gen, and Thoughtworks.
Thank you again to all our partners: Control Group, Girl Develop It, and New York Tech Meetup.
Thank you again to NYU Poly for the overnight space.
Thank you again to all our volunteers and mentors.
Thank you again of course to all our fantastic Jacks and Jills!
Hacking is sweeter with free Phin and Phebes ice cream.
Hack’n Jill continues to grow because of you.
Have any pictures from the event? Write a recap blog post? Send them our way and we’ll post them.
We’ve added event photos on Facebook and Instagram. Tag yourself!
Stay tuned to Twitter and our newsletter for updates on future events and activities.
Hack’n Jill believes that diverse teams built better products. We bring together an equal number of men and women to innovate and build in a balanced environment. While we do not require teams to be gender-balanced, we do believe that single-gender teams are squandering opportunities to collaborate and learn from people unlike themselves.
Hacksgiving is about giving back. From helping New York recover after Sandy, to creating recommendation engines for school donations, to just about anything in between, we want to see apps that allow users to find, give, share, communicate, and collaborate to solve problems in their communities.
Leveraging open-source resources is strongly encouraged, but all submissions must be built within the time frame of Hacksgiving alone (9pm November 9th – 7:30PM November 10th). With the exception of partner-specific API prizes, participants do not need to incorporate Partner API’s or Data sets to win. Team projects must be listed on our Hackerleage Projects page by 5pm on November 10th to be considered.
Is it functional? (25%)
Is it intuitive? (25%)
Is it impactful? (25%)
Longevity (25%)
For those of you wanting to hack all night, you can do so at NYU Poly Dumbo, which is a 2-minute walk from Etsy.
Sign up now! We’re offering 40 tickets on a first-come, first serve basis.
When: 11pm to 8am, Nov 9th-10th
Where: NYU Poly Dumbo, 20 Jay St., Ste 312, DUMBIO, Brooklyn (map>
Unable to make it? No problem! We understand it’s been a tough week for NYC!
If you can’t attend, please change your RSVP status on Eventbrite. There are currently 41 on our waitlist who would love to take your spot!
Don’t hesitate to get in touch by email, twitter, or facebook.
You can find more information about the following on our Hackerleague Page:
Vanessa Hurst: Founder, Developers for Good
Vanessa is a data-focused technologist, avid coder for humanity, and founder of Developers for Good, a network of technologists who use their skills to further social missions. She co-founded Girl Develop It, an initiative to teach software development in low-cost, judgment-free environments.
Aurelia Moser: Digital Archivist
Aurelia Moser is a librarian and laboratory technician based in Brooklyn. As a VP of SLA@Pratt, a teaching assistant for Pratt’s Math & Science Department, and an Information Architect atControl Group, she balances experience in special, scientific and dev departments.
Lucas Nelson: Associate, DFJ Gotham
Lucas is an Associate atDFJ Gotham in NYC, where he focuses on seed and A-round investing. Prior to DFJ Gotham, he was a senior manager for product security at Adobe following his time as an investment associate at Union Square Venture Partners.
Matt Story: Director of Eng., Axial Market
Matt leads the AxialMarket Corps of Engineers, responsible for driving the company’s technical vision. Matt’s passionate about developing operating systems, and contributing to the open-source FreeBSD Operating System and Bash Unix shell.
Due to space restrictions at Etsy’s HQ, Hacker Jack and Designer Jack tickets for Hacksgiving are now sold out.
If you’d like to attend Hacksgiving, we strongly encourage you to sign up for our waitlist on our Eventbrite page.
If you won’t be able to attend, we encourage you to change your ticket so others may participate.
How our waitlist works:
Confused? Need help?
Email us at hi [at] hacknjill [dot] com and we’ll sort it out for you.
You can also get in touch in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter.