It was also a tremendous success.

The combined efforts of IEEE, UPE, the CSUA and ST@B this year brought in record attendance – more than double last year’s finishing entrants.

Our judging panel was par none. I watched in mixed horror and admiration as students defended their design choices against the constructive interrogation of Professor Brian Harvey and the representatives from Y-Combinator, Kinfo, Palantir, and Facebook.

But more important, perhaps, was the personal experience of being a participant.

Me, post 5 RedBulls and 7 Mountain Dews.

I am not actually a terribly experienced programmer, and this was the first time I tried to pit my nascent abilities against the challenge of creating something completely novel, original, and mine. I’ll admit it here – my project never worked.

What did work was the instigation to try, and the fact that even my failure gave me enough experience that I’m going to get this 3-dimensional computer vision control problem working if it kills me. The camaraderie wasn’t bad either. Struggling with everything you have while simultaneously fighting off 36 hours sans sleep is an experience that can’t be compared. It brings you closer to your teammates. Makes you laugh at very silly things. Sometimes mildly hallucinate…

Finally, and of greatest impact I think, was seeing some of the pretty tremendous achievements Cal students are capable of. Whether it was the winning web-based remote application toolkit, 3D news visualization, or the whimsical defense-of-stack in missile command – the intelligence and possibility crammed into one room was palpable. I have to say it was a pretty great feeling to be associated, even loosely, with the creative process taking place.

1st Place- The Hiro Protagonist
Chase Shimmin, Jacob Howard

Chase and Jacob described their project as “an application framework that allows GUI applications to be rendered and interacted with from both a user’s desktop environment as well as via a web server, where they applications are rendered using XHTML/CSS/JavaScript. The application state is managed by an application server, which interacts with the local application interface through widgets and with the web-based interface through AJAX callbacks.” Very impressive work in only 18 hours.

2nd Place- News Kaiser
Yiding Jia, Jeremy Cowles

Yiding and Jeremey described their project as a 3D news vizualization program.

3rd Place- Kaplan Killers
Upinder Malhi, Edward Lin

Upinder and Edward built a simple yet useful SAT helper. Their firefox extension highlights SAT words and shows the user a dashboard of words learned.

Honorable Mention- Ani Mani
Anhang Zhu, Muller Zhang, Jeff Yan, Avik Das

Team Ani Mani built an Adobe Flash analogue that produces scripted SVG, in compliance with open standards supported in several browsers.

In their own words: “We made an SVG-based animation framework, consisting of a GUI to specify animations and a Javascript framework to render the animation in a standards-compliant browser. Only well-accepted web standards are used and the both the tool and the resulting output are lightweight and easily accessible to enterprising hackers.”

Honorable Mention- Purple Skittles
Ian Henderson, Charles Ahn

Ian and Charles built a missile command game, where you literally defend program stacks from corruption.

We would like to thank our sponsors Palantir Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Alsop Louie Partners, and Kinfo! Also congratulations to event co-sponsors CSUA, IEEE, and UPE.

Updated at 2:30 PM Saturday

Congrats to winners!

1. The Hiro Protagonist
2. News Kaiser
3. Kaplan Killers
Honorable Mention – Ani Mani
Honorable Mention – Purple Skittles

Check out descriptions here.

Check out the justin.tv feed of the project presentations

Updated at 11:45 AM Saturday

The coding is winding down with half the groups speeding to the finish and the other half leisurely walking around the Woz. Here is the final few pictures before our Hackathon recap….

Updated at 9:15 AM Saturday

Hacking will end in less than 2 hours. Teams are starting to sign up to present here.

Population in the Woz has decreased to between 35-40.

The Soda Floors 2,3, and 7 are also home to another 17 hackers in 5 teams.

Updated at 6:30 AM Saturday

40 people left in the Woz, 8 on the 2nd floor, 2 on the 3nd floor, and 6 on the 7th floor. Surprisingly only 2 people asleep in the Woz.

Updated at 4:30 AM Saturday

The population in Woz has temporarily dropped to about 40 with 4-5 hackers taking a power nap. The 7th floor 3rd floor, and 2nd floor teams are still going at it, bringing the current count to 65 hackers. Most importantly, almost all the teams are still accounted for!

Here is a quick team status check:

1 team has dropped out
14 teams will have something to present
6 Groups MIA in Soda/Cory
2 are already done
2 are praying
2 are struggling to get Open CV to work

Updated at 2:30 AM Saturday

500 pieces of sushi came and went between 1:00AM and 1:30AM. Energized for at least a few hours, the coders are hitting it hard again.

Here is an overview of the different hacks:

Games
- Interactive Video pong
- Assasin-like game in Java
- Video game with gravity physics and accelerometer hardware
- MS Paint meets Word, a simple note-taking interface

Web Applications
- able{set}- Discover what people around you are good at
- A site for getting people in touch with beta software
- A Web 2.0 book swap website
- Craigslist apartment listing integrated into Google maps to see proximity to local POI’s
- File-sharing through image hosting sites
- Learning tool for SAT Prep
- Youtube search interface
- Changing the landscape of credit card acquisition
- Visualizing related news events

Chat Tools
- Chat log visualizer to show your social graph
- Context highlighting in a chat client
- presentation tool to encourage audience involvement

Other
- Flying mouse, mouse controlled by Webcam
- GUI to create SVG-based animations and a Javascript framework to run them
- Application framework for apps that render to both the desktop and a web interface
- Animation of tree perturbation over tree space

Updated at 12:00 AM Saturday

With 6 hours in, there are still 65-70 people going strong. Below is a pic of 50 people in the Woz. There are also 8 in the 2nd floor labs, 2 in the Mac Lab, and 10 on the 6th-7th floor.

From the look of certain hackers it appears people have entered a hyper-concentrated state…must be the combination of Redbull and doritos.

Updated at 11:00 PM Friday

We created a Justin.tv feed here

Updated at 10:00 PM Friday

We just finished sign in: as of 30 minutes ago there were 80 people on 26 teams. Most are setup in Wozniak Lounge with a few teams in the Mac Lab, CS61 Labs, and 7th floor lounges.

We have an updated schedule for the rest of the night:

1:00AM- Nude Sushi Delivery (Wozniak Lounge)
9:00AM- Breakfast bagels and muffins (Wozniak Lounge)
11:45PM- Coding STOPS
12:00PM- Presentations Begin
1:30PM- Presentations End, Judges Convene
1:45PM- Winners announced

Updated at 6:45 PM Friday

There was a quick intro by MC and hacker Dwight Crow followed by a hackathon-relevant talk by Palantir engineers Jacob Scott and Paul Twohey. Jacob and Paul fired up the crowd of 85 geeks with a history of their past successful hacks, some of which are now being used by the US Military and intelligence services.

At 6:30PM everyone fired up the engines and started 17.5 hours of coding.

I’m at the end of my third semester as head TA of Berkeley’s Ruby on Rails class (currently CS 194, formerly CS 198). I’ve been with it since the inaugural class in Spring 2007. The class has evolved from being loosely organized, pass or fail, and taught in the main lobby of the RAD Lab (who sponsors it) to this semester’s full fledged, letter graded, “Software as a Service” powerhouse with almost 50 students enrolled. What hasn’t changed is the end result of every term: groups of students building great web apps with Ruby on Rails. In my opinion, it’s the core of the class and why I’ve stayed involved for so long. Fall 2008 was no different; we had some great apps!

Overall, it’s great to be involved in a class that:

Gives Students Options

Our students really get to own their projects by deciding what to work on, with whom, and how to actually go about implementing their ideas. This is in contrast to a large number of more typical computer science classes where you’re given lots of code, told what to do and how to do it, and don’t always work in groups. In the end, people who take our class often end up building things that transcend the semester.

Gets People Hired

Not only have we taught agile methodologies, big ideas like metaprogramming, and scalability in the cloud, but we’ve also given students skills that make them immediately hire-able. Timothy Yung interned at Yahoo, Jerry Cheung went on to Coupa Software, Hubert Wong and Jimmy Nguyen were recruited into the RAD Lab, and I myself spent an excellent summer at Venrock.

Encourages Entrepreneurship

There are few classes outside of the Haas School of Business that let students get away with dreaming the startup dream. We on the other hand, treat projects like micro startups – you get what you put in. From the very semester it was offered, building projects for our class has been described as doing a quick startup.

For a full listing of this semester’s projects check out the pbwiki we used for project brainstorming and keeping track of who’s up to what. There’s also a live blog of the demo day presentations.

Who’s enabled all this?

Our fantastic professors:
Armando Fox
Will Sobel
David Patterson

along with current and former TA’s:
Arthur Klepchukov (me)
Hubert Wong
Jimmy Nguyen
Alex Bain

Thanks for another great semester everybody!

More details coming soon.