In the beginning…

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).

The keys to success…

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.

Looking back…

With your help and support, we are so proud of what we’ve done this year.

• 49 clever hacks over 2 hackathons focused on enjoying life today and building a better tomorrow
• 50 helpful volunteers
• 17 dedicated corporate sponsors
• Features in The Next Web, WNYC, BetaBeat, and the personal blogs of our hackers
• Enthusiastic involvement and encouragement from partners including NYTM, Girl Develop It, Control Group, Women 2.0, WIM, and others
  Shout-outs and panel features at SXSW

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.

Hack’n Jill Happy Hour

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.

Mastering the Technical Interview

April 16, 2013
Get tips and practice interview questions and whiteboard coding.

Hackathon

June 7-8, 2013
Our summer hackathon returns, this time hosted at Bloomberg HQ.

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.

Getting the tools

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.

Using the templates

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:

1. an index of items by group
2. a group page with details for that group and items in that group
3. an item detail page

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
});

Deployment??

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. 

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

Help us get better

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!

51% Female

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.

The Winners

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

Overall Winners

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)

API Winners

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

What We’re Thankful For

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.

Share, Clean, Fix, Visit, Care, Give, Do

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.

Rules:

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.

Judging Criteria:

Is it functional? (25%)

• Does it accomplish its stated goal?
• Does it work as is, or does it require additional resources (code or data?)

Is it intuitive? (25%)

• Is it easy to understand?
• Is it easy to use?

Is it impactful? (25%)

• Does it solve a real problem?
• How many people does it impact?

Longevity (25%)

• Can it be used by others and/or can others contribute?
• How likely is it to be used and/or further developed after this weekend?

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.

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:

• To add yourself to our waitlist, use the waitlist link next to the Jack Hacker ticket (even if you’re not a jack hacker).  Eventbrite does not allow us to create a waitlist for each ticket type.
• The waitlist next to the Jack Hacker ticket is the waitlist fort the entire event, no matter your ticket type.
• Waitlist tickets will be released in batches in the two weeks leading up to the event
• When you’ve been moved off our waitlist, you’ll receive an email from Eventbrite that asks you to sign up for a ticket
• Almost all waitlist participants were accepted to the event for #hackyoursummer. If you’re in doubt, add yourself.

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.

New location!

We’re really excited to have the awesome people at ETSY hosting us. Etsy is a online marketplace for handmade and vintage goods and has been a leader of supporting women in tech. Their offices are in the heart of DUMBO, a burgeoning hub of technical innovation. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to decorate your home with hand-spun pottery and paper mache astronauts, you’ll love taking a peek into the cute and quirky Etsy headquarters.

Mr. Grit stands watch

New Partners!

We’re working with three other New York organizations:  New York Tech Meetup, Girl Develop It, and Control Group. We love these organizations not only for what they’ve done for women in tech but for their active and positive roles in the New York tech scene. Each of these organizations is working hard everyday to create a more equal and diverse world. Special thanks for their partnership and support.

NY companies demo to the capacity crowd at NYTM’s monthly meetup

New and Better Prizes!

It’s not always about the prizes. But if you’re in it to win it,  our Hacksgiving prizes are bigger and better. Prizes will include:

• 30 minute call with Dave McClure
• Opportunity to demo winning hack at New York Tech Meetup
• Nexus 7 tablets. For each team member
• Cold Hard Cash. Lots of it. Stay tuned!
• Single malt scotch
• Much, much more

Interested?

Join us on Nov 9th and 10th! Tickets are free and you can sign up on eventbrite.

• Missy Kayko (Don’t Get Mugged)
• Sophie Chou (Wing Woman)
• Koushik Dasika (Music Mood)
• Matt Jibson (NYC Now)
• Jesse Pollak (Andut)
• Daniel Alabi, GigaOm (Bed Battles)
• Kane Albarron, Alexandra White, Yodle (Why Don’t We…)
• Temboo
• Mashery
• So Particular (French!)
• Eugenia Koo (Hack’n Jill!)