TechCrunch Disrupt Hack Day

After almost 20 hours of straight coding (ok, I took a small nap and some breaks) my first ‘Hack Day’ is coming to a close. While it’s still fresh I wanted to do a post about my experience.

I came into the Hack Day with high hopes of creating an application I’ve been wanting to make for a long time. Much like life, things didn’t turn out how I had planned. After coding for about 7 hours on my idea I realized that the task I was taking on was too big for one programmer to do in 20 hours. After much internal debate I decided to abandon my idea and try for something new. The problem was I didn’t come with any other ideas beforehand, and so I spent another hour and a half flailing around.

The application I ended up building is what I’m hoping will morph into a ‘social search’ of sorts and I’m really happy with what I accomplished. The application takes a search (keyword and location) and uses the foursquare and Yelp APIs to give you weighted search results that are more relevant/contextual than what you would typically receive. The process right now is… crude, but I think the idea is promising.

I’m looking forward to continuing with this idea and hopefully launching some version of it in the near(-ish) future to see what people think.

Outside of what I built, the thing that I enjoyed most and was most impressed with during the Hack Day is the amazing talent in the tech world. I felt very fortunate to be surrounded by developers who have launched (and often times sold) their own businesses. I was also humbled by how willing these developers were to help anyone and by their lack of arrogance. It was an environment of absolute respect, and that was refreshing.