This weekend was the Amazon Hackathon in Glasgow, the first of its kind in the UK. The idea was simple: get 50 students to show up in teams, give them 20 hours to innovate and create, and provide them with $50 of AWS credit and a stack of pizzas to power their ideas. What followed was anything but simple. A 20 hour frenzy of brainstorming and prototyping to create something which we would eventually present to our peers and the "Amazonians". Some amazing ideas were demonstrated, with one team netting $1,000 in AWS credit to help kickstart their idea of a gifting-based social network.
I entered as part of Team Giraffa Cakes, a team of four from the University of Glasgow. Disappointingly, three of our team were the only 4th year students from Glasgow to enter. Our idea was to crowd-source information to help inform product comparisons. Users would be able to search for two products on Amazon and our web service would then gather relevant content from sources such as Twitter, Blogger and Youtube to help inform decisions. We implemented a system which did just that, performing sentiment analysis on the tweets and blog posts to give an overview of how people feel about those products. At a glance users would be able to tell if opinion about each product was generally negative, neutral or positive. Information from the web service was made available to both an Android app which I implemented and a website frantically thrown together in record time by James.
The experience was an interesting one and was lots of fun, despite the intense desire for sleep that kicked in around 4am. To stay sane as the night went on we found ourselves increasingly taking breaks just to get away from the computer. Cold pizza and instant coffee from a kettle of questionable hygiene proved to be a welcome respite and every hour or so we went outside for a short break. As appreciated as the fresh air was, it was probably the darkness which was most welcome; a break for our eyes. I think the location of the event may have contributed to the drowsiness of everyone. The lab it was held in is notoriously hot and stuffy; in retrospect our team probably would've been more comfortable downstairs in our own, gloriously air conditioned lab. Although then we'd have to walk further for cold pizza.
Overall it was a blast. We had a lot of fun, created something we were all proud of and the icing on the cake was that our fellow hackers voted us the People's Choice. It was great to see so many ideas brought to completion in a single night - it's not uncommon to see university coursework that doesn't work after several weeks of work! Thanks for all the pizza and fresh fruit, Amazon... same time next year?
I entered as part of Team Giraffa Cakes, a team of four from the University of Glasgow. Disappointingly, three of our team were the only 4th year students from Glasgow to enter. Our idea was to crowd-source information to help inform product comparisons. Users would be able to search for two products on Amazon and our web service would then gather relevant content from sources such as Twitter, Blogger and Youtube to help inform decisions. We implemented a system which did just that, performing sentiment analysis on the tweets and blog posts to give an overview of how people feel about those products. At a glance users would be able to tell if opinion about each product was generally negative, neutral or positive. Information from the web service was made available to both an Android app which I implemented and a website frantically thrown together in record time by James.
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| Our Android app, showing the product overview. |
The experience was an interesting one and was lots of fun, despite the intense desire for sleep that kicked in around 4am. To stay sane as the night went on we found ourselves increasingly taking breaks just to get away from the computer. Cold pizza and instant coffee from a kettle of questionable hygiene proved to be a welcome respite and every hour or so we went outside for a short break. As appreciated as the fresh air was, it was probably the darkness which was most welcome; a break for our eyes. I think the location of the event may have contributed to the drowsiness of everyone. The lab it was held in is notoriously hot and stuffy; in retrospect our team probably would've been more comfortable downstairs in our own, gloriously air conditioned lab. Although then we'd have to walk further for cold pizza.
Overall it was a blast. We had a lot of fun, created something we were all proud of and the icing on the cake was that our fellow hackers voted us the People's Choice. It was great to see so many ideas brought to completion in a single night - it's not uncommon to see university coursework that doesn't work after several weeks of work! Thanks for all the pizza and fresh fruit, Amazon... same time next year?
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