Foursquare Hackathon Madison
I had the great pleasure of participating in the Foursquare Hackathon 2013 yesterday. It was a fun opportunity to meet other developers as well as non developers in the Madison area who are interested in building new products / services, social media, geography, and entrepreneurship.
On the technical side it provided (yet) another reason to find a way to make use of the Foursquare API. While many people still think of Foursquare only as “the check in app” (including a large portion of the people who attended the Hackathon yesterday) I really love it’s vast venue data set as well as the opportunities to bring people together socially and geographically. The Hackathon was also a great way to share tech knowledge and get to work with things that I don’t normally get to at my day job. A great example for me was getting to build the server API for my team’s project in Node.js. Every time I use Node.js it still feels weird writing JavaScript for the server but it turned out to be the fastest way to get our API built as well as a good way for me (Java background) and my teammate (.NET background) to be able to work together.
Finally, I’d like to thank the crew at SnowShoe Stamp for hosting the Madison meet up. They provided a cool workspace, coffee, and beer… everything that a successful hackathon needs! They’re a great group of people that have got an amazing product that has so many potential uses.