Community Roundup: Video Games, Goofiness, and Hacking for Good
Really Really Really Into Celery at Uncommon Hacks (Like, Really Into It)
Right there on the website, Uncommon Hacks lives up to its name. Cleverly incorporating vintage arcade games like Pong and Pac-Man (even a text adventure schedule!), the visitor gets a good dose of the quirky spirit powering the hackathon hosted by the University of Chicago’s Polsky Exchange in Chicago.
On the weekend of February 10th-11th, 141 hackers got together at the Exchange to make something “creative and fun and possibly totally useless!” Along the way, they played Soylent Pong and enjoyed free earplugs in a large room for sleeping.
All the tounges-in-cheek at Uncommon Hacks help foster a very welcoming spirit, even for newbies, as they explain on their GitHub guide: “Have no fear if you think you’re not good enough to work on a team. There is always something for everyone to do on a hackathon team, whether it be design, the front-end work, or the back-end work, connecting the circuits for the hardware device. Just make it known that you are willing to work and to learn, and you should be great.”
So what was the most uncommon of the hacks this year? That award went to Crows vs. Celery, a multiplayer game pitting plumage against roughage. Other hacks high in uselessness included human turn signals and a “Rube Codeberg” machine that uses a series of “ridiculous” programming languages to accomplish the simple (and arguably very useless) task of distinguishing the color of an LED strip.
Though organizers stressed that teams shouldn’t feel like their projects had to “be the next big thing or something you’d use every day,” plenty of very useful uncommonalities won prizes as well, like Listen Hear, an app to help the hearing-impaired process important non-language based audio like door knocks, sirens, and crying babies.
On Twitter, judge Jen Meyers called Uncommon Hacks “the friendliest hackathon I’ve encountered.” With their unique blend of irreverence and hospitality, it’s easy to see why! Eat your celery before the crows get it, and add Uncommon Hacks to your hackathon bucket list.
Overcoming Adversity at UGAHacks
Not every hackathon has a rosy liftoff story. UGAHacks organizer Danny Lee was frank with us about the challenges he and his team faced in getting UGAHacks 2018 off the ground, contending with overflowing toilets and organizer shakeup. But with a little restructuring, a new influx of organizer labor and passion, and a lot of hard work, the third annual UGAHacks came together in a big way.
Over a 36-hour weekend between February 9th and 11th, 100 hackers buckled down at Thinc Studios in Athens, GA. They enjoyed video game competitions, social mixers, and a little late-night karaoke. They learned from workshops about everything from cybersecurity to machine learning, as well as getting a peek into real life tech applications at big companies like Home Depot.
The prize-winning projects at UGAHacks 2018 suggest that perhaps the spirit of overcoming adversity seeped into the hacks themselves. For example, Communal Kitchen won Best Design for their app, which leverages self-sufficient Raspberry Pi-powered kiosks to help businesses and private citizens deliver food to the homeless.
Other projects also showed off the ingenuity of the UGA hacker community. There was the aptly-named rhymer, which suggests rhymes and counts syllables for the Vim text editor. And there was HexHunter, a game that interpreted the hackathon theme of “vision” by throwing the player a random hex code and giving them points for “capturing” that hex code IRL with a cell phone camera.
As UGAHacks says on their website: “It’s amazing what you can make with a team and a table.” 2018 was all about overcoming adversity and going “back to the basics” for UGAHacks, and we salute their hard work. We are excited to see where 2019 takes the reinvigorated UGAHacks!
