The final event of 2014 took place December 6th, 1200 students came together over 35 venues, for a relaxing weekend of learning, building and celebration. Our first ever Local Hack Day was a huge success.
Local Hack Day was also the first ever hacker event that 15 of our 35 schools had ever hosted. We’re delighted to have been able to work together with these schools and are looking forward to seeing their hacker communities grow during the new year.
Hackers loved celebrated the end of the year together with some great workshops and fantastic swag. We heard back from countless participants telling us “the courses were amazing,” that they “loved the hats!” or that “the chatrooms were awesome.”
Workshops
With the start of spring season we’re making every workshop available online! At a hackathon, wondering how to build your first website, mobile app or hardware project? Check out all of the tutorials from Local Hack Day.
These are some of the best workshops for getting started if you’ve never attended a hackathon before:
1. API 101
Sam Agnew from Ordr.in gave a fantastic workshop on how to use APIs. Curious on how to get started using a sponsors API? This talk will get you started using bearcatfacts.info and the ordr.in API.
2. Git
Version control is critical for collabration at hackathons. Randall Hunt of AWS introduces version control with git for beginners and goes over some of the more advanced features.
3. Intro to Arduino
Bonnie Eisenman from Codecademy introduces how to get started with hardware hacking using the Arduino.
4. Intro to Android
Kevin Galligan from Touch Labs goes over how to get started with Mobile Development using Android.
5. How to be a Badass Hacker.
One of Swift’s personal missions is to help hackers acquire the tools, skills, and connections that they need to be awesome (or at least substantially badass). These are some of the things he’s learned along the way that might help someone get there.
The rest of the workshops are worth watching as well. Easily. They’re full of introductions on how to use technology like Myos, NodeJS, Bioinformatics and much more.
For a full list of topics, see the full Local Hack Day schedule.