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Hackathon VI



Hello and welcome back to another Hackathon recap. For those of you just joining us, Hackathons are a periodic opportunity for our engineers to take a break, scratch an itch, and demonstrate their creativity. So, while you’re probably not going to see any of these projects on the site, we are still going to show off a few of our favorites.

Universally hailed as “the best Hackathon ever” by anonymous sources, it was an exciting couple of days! Regular viewers will expect to be dazzled by the array of software wizardry with projects including improvements to MRJob so impressive they were dubbed MRGod, an IRC bot that can look up asciified cat pictures while pushing code and a computer that freestyles dub step to the beat of mobile contributions. 

Folks that needed to step up their coding energy a beat taking a DDR break.
Beyond pure software virtuosity, hardware played a larger role than in any previous Hackathon. One team (Nuclear Khaos) decided plain dice were just not random enough: they hooked into a Geiger counter and unleashed the power of true hardware randomness. Don’t worry, their depleted uranium is just enough to test the geiger counter and can’t hurt anyone.


Nuclear Khaos: Harnessing the twin powers of atomic energy and raw style.

Other hardware hackery included a mechanical computer, physical switches that can push code (lets face it, just hitting Enter doesn’t feel momentous enough when you launch a new continent), and a sound & fireproofed box to keep our MakerBot quiet while it prints during the day.

But enough of my yapping, you should see for yourself.  We’ve brought a few of the projects out in a special episode of Yelp Roadshow:

 

If you think any of this might be up your alley then you probably should take a gander at our job site, we would love to have you join us for the next one!


Until next time, Hack on!
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