This year marked the 2nd annual Houston Hackathon held at the Houston Technology Center in Downtown Houston. This year’s event pitted 18 teams against each other to brainstorm up and prototype a technological innovation which benefits the city for the chance to pitch the idea to mayor Annise Parker. Patrick Wolf, Jesus Hernandez, Thomas Garza, and I formed a group unofficially titled “Team Awesome” to create a concept around the XPlatformCloudKit. At first, we utilized the framework to consume Police Report data as participants were encouraged to used data repos from the city’s open data initiative. However, due to the agility of the XPCK framework, we found ourselves with a complete and published project after approximately 6 hours! We quickly shifted our approach to pitch the ease with which we were to able create a polished application as a pitch to encourage development amongst the community. Using our app HPD Reports as a proof of concept, we showed the mayor that we could enable the consumption of a variety of data. This posed a great opportunity to “appify” even more open data repos and even educate the community on how to do so! At the end of the day, we wound up winning an honorable mention and got an excellent “Winner” banner placed on our Challenge Post submission.
Also awesome, was the fact that our teammate Patrick Wolf’s son’s team won the “Student Challenge” for their not one, but three websites that they created to better service citizens of Houston. These included a Biking trail service, an HISD lunch menu, and Houston Hackathon promo site!
View the official Challenge Post submission for HPD Reports:
Download the HPD Reports App @ http://hpdreports.azurewebsites.net/
So much fun! We even got to meet Mayor Annise Parker!