Mar 21, 2011 | Podio Hack Day Wrapup

I decided to spend Sunday indoors at Podio's new space on 6th street in San Francisco, hacking away at code for a chance to win a ticket to Denmark or a new iPad.

The premise of the hackathon was to use one of the several APIs available from the hackathon sponsors, which included Yammer, inboxQ, Podio, ZenDesk, Disqus and Mashery. After a brief introduction from each of the companies, I still hadn't much of an idea - I figured it would be good to use Podio, and I figured every opportunity to attend a hackathon was another opportunity to familiarize myself with new API providers and good programming practices. Podio is a relatively all-purpose "app" generator/provider out of Copenhagen - since I wanted something to mash it up with I settled on inboxQ, a service that allows people to answer questions from Twitter. I've been on somewhat of a Twitter binge lately, as you may have noticed. I also wanted to leverage Podio as a way to import the questions and manage them internally.

I had made decent progress by midday, settling on Quinbox as a development project name and working towards some cool approaches, like geolocation and more solid Twitter integration. In particular, inboxQ currently remains a Chrome/Firefox extension, which, though is fantastic, still probably needs some sort of web presence.

I felt I had too much coffee for too little moving around, so I had to move about outdoors a couple of times in order to let out the caffeine. Development was promptly over at 6pm, at which point Quinbox was officially made live. I resorted to making a demo screencast because I wasn't confident that I could demo the app and talk about it at the same time - that's where I think having multiple team-members helps. For now, at least, I like being a solo act.

Some of the many awesome apps showcased include project management (Scrum + Podio), social Github (Github + Yammer), and Disqus visualizations. I didn't win, but I'm hopeful that I can take Quinbox somewhere, which is more than enough to satisfy me! I think I like making things that are usable by the general public, or at least demonstrable with good UI and a solid backend to support it. That sort of philosophy can quickly get me in trouble though - this is my fifth app since January!

Congratulations to the winning teams!

Also written on this day..

• 2005: Seliplng Mskitaes
• 2004: Movie Review: Along Came Polly