6 Tips: Getting your Hackathon project into Production

Recently there has been a steady stream of stories about projects that started as a Hackathon idea going into production at some of Silicon Valleys top companies. It's well known that Facebook's 'Like' button started off as a Hackathon project, and Ebay just announced a Hackathon project has led to them using Node.js for the first time in production. So what will give your project a chance of making it out to production for your users to benefit from? The team @ NerdAbility.com are giving you six tips to get things moving when your boss gives you some time to hack away!

1. Share Your Project

So you have made something really cool, maybe on your own or with some other devs. Now is the time to share your Hackathon project and get other people within the company excited! If it's a tool for the dev team why not give a lunch-time talk or send out a note with a quick-start guide. Once people see that you have made something cool and interesting it is surprising how quick it can get added to priority list for more work / release.

2. Don't worry (too much) about the technology

Hackathons are meant to be a chance to try out something new or maybe do something differently, so don't let people tell you your work has to be production ready right away. Often you will do your best work when you are excited and lets face it all of developers love shiny new things! But, once you have the concept nailed and something implemented be prepared to be flexible. Getting a new technology live can often be time consuming, so sometimes you will need to give and take to see your project get the light of day.

3. Be prepared to say 'OK that didn't work'

So you have tried to make something and, well, it didn't quite work out. This is still a valuable project! You will have learnt new things and hopefully take away a few lessons. The most important thing to do is make sure you and your team do another Hackathon! Still share your work with the rest of the team and who knows it may inspire someone else. Next time you can take a fresh idea and see what happens!

4. Upload your project to GitHub

So you have finished your kick ass project and your company decides on a change of direction, your project just isn't needed. Shock horror, this does happen. Why not try to get permission to put your project onto GitHub? This is a great way to share your work and who knows it may be just what another developer / company is looking for. Then instead of your code being in production in one place, it could be used all over the world. Dream big.

5. Work with the business guys

Great things can happen in pairs! Use your technical genius to think up a solution for someone in the business with a problem or idea. If you address a hidden problem or tap into an undiscovered opportunity you will look like hero. The great thing about this is your work will hopefully have business value so you instantly know it will have a better chance getting released. Also working with someone with a different perspective could open your mind to come up with an out of the box solution that will blow the socks off the rest of the dev team!

6. Launch it yourself

If you have built a cool application in your own time, then just launch it yourself! There are plenty of cloud providers offering free basic hosting such as Appfog, AWS and CloudBees amongst many others. Just be careful of any legal complexities that may occur from having users such as data protection and anti-SPAM regulations.

Finally.....

We loved this presentation by Philip Su, Facebook Site Lead London, from back in February this year on Facebook's engineering process and how they use Hackathons as part of their development culture.

Check it out:

Philip Su: Site Lead at Facebook - Engineering process and philosophy at Facebook from HN London on Vimeo.

Essential Resources to Become a Life Long Learner (in tech)

Is one of your New Year Resolutions to re-skill? Thinking about re-training for a new career (or even just a new hobby) in tech? Then you're in luck! 

Today, more than ever, the barrier to entry for starting to learn a new technology or programming language is all but nonexistent, all you really need is a computer (or even a mobile device) and a web connection and you are pretty much good to go - just choose your preferred technology, an IDE and get started.  Almost everything is open source or at least free to use for a single developer just out to learn and there is a wealth of blogs, articles and Q'n'A sites ready to help you with tutorials, walk-through's and helpful advice - many of these backed with ready and running code bases on GitHub free for you to play with and generally work out what is going on.

However, with all these resources it can sometimes be a bit daunting with so much content. Once you have chosen a language how do you know where to start? Here are some of our favourite sites and resources that we have discovered and found useful in learning new skills:

• iTunes U - a lesser known category on iTunes is their academic section, iTunes U(niversity) featuring loads of podcasts and lectures from a range of academic organisations, and some of this stuff is serious! Several large universities have uploaded full lecture series there, and by and large they are free to download (yes, you have to install iTunes, which sucks, we know).  Want to take the full term of Stanford university's iOS course? Its up there. Want to learn AI for chess playing from Cambridge uni? Yep, got that too. And for free.
• MIT OpenWare - MIT have been one of the strongest advocates of open sourced education. A lot of there lecture series are online (can also be found on iTunes, but can be avoided).  Is it just us who thinks its amazing that anyone around the world with a web connection can get educated by the most prestigious academic organisations around?
• Khan Academy - there is a lot of hype around this one, well funded with some pretty big names supporting it (jQuery creator John Resig is a Dean there), a not-for-profit aiming at providing free education for everyone. The academy provides lots of video based courses as well as interactive challenges and detailed stats on how you are doing.
• Udacity - this is another recent, well-funded startup trying to tackle free higher education for all. Founded my three robotocists it is slowly building a very respectable catalogue of uni level courses ranging from CS101 to AI for robotics. As with the Khan academy, the lectures are purely for the web so the videos are clear and designed for remote learning (different from the filmed university lectures which are targeting classroom based learning).  We have recently created and Open Sourced the Spring-Social implementation of the Khan Academy API - so if you are working with the JVM and want to have a play with the Khan Academy API then check it out on GitHub
• CodeAcademy - we have mentioned before we are fans of code academy, code academy is an in-browser development environment that walks you through programming exercises to help you learn with your hands - currently supporting JavaScript, HTML, Ruby and Python
• Free eBooks - there are loads of great free eBooks available online, so many there is no point listing them, instead I will just point you here. Which leads nicely on to the next point..
• StackOverflow - what really needs to be said about SO? It is the definitive q'n'a site for tech. If you are just starting learning head over and sign up, the help from the incredibly active community over there will be invaluable (although be sure to read the posting guides, they can be a little unforgiving at times!).
• Coursera - Another massively popular online learning resource, this one recently generated a lot of interest with its recent Scala course taught by the original creator of the language!  We are currently working on some secret integration with Coursera at NerdAbility, and you will soon be able to integrate your Coursera account and show off which courses you have completed!

Hopefully the above resources help on your path to re-skilling.  In reality, getting your hands dirty with code and trying to solve problems and fix errors is the best way to learn, so don't forget to get stuck in - and maybe when you are more confident try answering questions on StackOverflow!

Of course, with these new found skills you will want to show them off, so we'd recommend heading to NerdAbility and registering (if you haven't as already) and update your skills, add your StackOverflow profile and even add a custom section talking about what you are learning (employers always love to know that candidates are proactive and motivated when it comes to learning new things and keeping up with technology). 

Leave your comments with any other tools and resources you have found useful in your journey of becoming a life long learner.