Longmont Hackathon

What an experience! I met so many fantastic people and learned a bunch at the Longmont Hackathon this past weekend. Skyline High School was well represented with a team of incredibly gifted young developers, but the star of the show was 14-year-old Jackson Roberts who took 1st place with his “Longmont Events” application.

For my application, I decided to build a fire hydrant locator. Initially this was a simple web application which utilized the Esri ArcGIS API for JavaScript along with the City of Longmont’s ArcGIS REST Services Directory which is hosted by OpenColorado. I used PhoneGap for the first time and was pleasantly surprised with the resulting Android application, but the iOS version turned out to be a little buggy. Links to the PhoneGap build and GitHub repository are available here via Hacker League.

I was already looking forward to the Boulder Civic Hackfest which is coming up on the weekend of June 1-2, but this event made me even more excited! Seeing talented engineers of all ages coming together to hack for a cause is something that I love, and I can only imagine what will come out of it. Special thanks to the City of Longmont for taking a chance and hosting an amazing event.