Alicia Sykes's Blog

Tweets by START_Hack

During the weekend of BattleHack I worked in a team developing a Digital Bucket Solution, a simple application that allows people to donate to charity bucket collectors even when they don't have any loose change, using their smart phone.

The backend was written in Node js and has an iOS client. It supports Apple Pay and all of BrainTree's services, it also uses iBeacons for detecting when you;v approached a charity collector.

Source Code for back-end

Web portal demo

My team

BattleHack 2015 was the biggest London BattleHack so far, held at the Tobacco Docks.

Was a great weekend, my only disappointment was that I did not win an axe :(

Swag

Stickers

Caffiine

The winners

Apps World 2014 in London was great this year, with over 1,600 attendees it was held at the ExCel, and had loads of good speakers and sponsors.

My favourite talks from day 2 were: first a talk titled responsive website or native app which was given by Geoff Parkhurst who's the CTO of Lovehoney, he weighed up the advantages and disadvantages of each side very nicely. This I found particularly interesting since it's relevant to work at the moment.

Another great talk was given by Grant Allen from Google, on extreme wearables. This image (sorry for the bad quality photo) actually shows something really cool. the axis on the left is the % of people who are awake, the axis on the bottom is the time of night. As you can see, between 10pm and 1am, the % of people awake falls, since they've gone to bed, however at 3:30 AM, it suddenly rises, this was due to a huge earth quake that night. Each different coloured line is a different city, and this data could potentially be used to give a short warning to an earth quake to people in further away cities. This particular data came from JawBone, but any basic activity tracker would have recorded similar results, and would have the scope to implement this.

I also attended several other very interesting talks seen  here

Introduction

Any student will know that mobile phones are a massive distraction to studying, but also have some utilities that help you get your work done, such as calculator or Wikipedia. This weekend I developed an application that aims to reduce the distractions cause by your Android device.

The interface is simple, you enter the amount of time you need to stay focused for, and press start. Study mode will mute all notifications and disable home and back buttons. It's not immediately easy to get out of the app once your in study mode, though you do still have access to core features such as emergency dialer, time...  Once the timer reaches zero you once again have full access to your phone.

Technical Details

Links

Screen Shots

Start Screen

Timer Screen

Additional Views

Droidcon London is a 2-day Android conference organised by Skills Matter. 

The first day was a community-led barcamp and democamp with talks and discussions given by opensource Android developers. The second day was packed full of presentations given by the worlds leading Android experts, on a range of Android topics. There were 1,200 attendees and loads of great sponsors, as well as an open bar party in the evening and a hackathon the following weekend.

Sponsors

There was also a wide range of sponsors including Microsoft Azure, Sony, PayPal/ Braintree, Intel, Epson, AppConverter, Amazon App Store, Facebook, Badoo, ooVoo and Google Developers. As well as many other Bronze sponsors. Attendees were free to talk to the sponsors about their software, products and services and ask questions (and get a ton of free t-shirts and stash!).

The Presentations

The Party

Setting Up

A few photos

Chet Haase - Practicing Practical Best Practices for Software Development Practitioners

Cyril Mottier - Android Wear

 

BattleHack is an annual world wide hackathon run by PayPal. This year I was lucky enough to once again get a ticket to the London event, which took place on the weekend of the 11th - 12th October 2014, at Level 39, Canary Wharf. Level 39 as always an amazing venue with a 360 degree panoramic view of London and Canary Wharf.



As with previous years the food was of course really good, and plenty of it, full breakfast, fish and chips for lunch, fare ground style snacks at tea, then hot dogs and PayPal fairy cakes and beer for dinner, and pizza for midnight snack - and that was just Saturdays meals!

The first few hours consisted of networking, opening talks and sponsor pitches. The sponsor talks were really good, and included SendGrid, Twillio, Nango, Relayr, context.io, JustGiving and NFC Ring. There was also an opportunity afterwards to talk to the sponsors and get help and information about using their products (and free t shirts and stickers!).

I was also very happy, since I won a Leap Motion Controller without even having to do that much! Thanks PayPal! It is a pretty cool piece of tech, so I will create a blog post reviewing it a bit later today.

Unfortunately I was unable to stay for the whole weekend (since I was running in a half marathon on Sunday morning) but I spent Saturday hacking into the early hours, and watched the presentations of the other hackers online after the event had finished. Some very cool stuff was created during BattleHack London 2014

:)


 



 























First prize included winning an axe! How cool!?

On Thursday 7th August a lucky group of interns and university students were invited to Facebook HQ on Brock Street in central London. The evening opened with some drinks and snacks (Facebook branded cupcakes!) and networking between the students, Facebook employees and Facebook interns.



There was then a short opening talk given by the organisers where they introduced themselves and their role within Facebook and gave the outline for the evening.

Next was dinner - in the Facebook canteen, which was AMAZING! There was a huge choice of high quality restaurant-standard food to choose from, all fresh and very tasty, also deserts and drinks also included. Facebook employees can eat at the Facebook restaurant for free, 3 meals a day.

After dinner we headed back to the room we arrived in, and had a talk given by current Facebook employees and interns about the interesting projects they were currently working on. There was then an hour or so of Q and A where we were given the opportunity to ask them about there work, life at Facebook and Facebook's future plans, all this was very interesting, as Facebook is such a fast moving company and totally unique.

After this we were set loose to check out some of the cool stuff they've got in the Facebook office, including riding a virtual roller coaster with an Oculus Rift, climbing the in-office climbing wall, checking out the retro gaming room, visiting the Facebook free candy shop (which had every type of sweet I think I've ever seen in my life!). There was also a coffee shop(of course free too, and better than all the high street chains). There was a variety of informal and comfy work areas like bean bags and sofas.







All in all, an amazing insite on what it would be like to work for Facebook, and how cool the job, office and people there are.