Hackathon this weekend. It was of course amazing!
I met a bunch of people from a lot of different NYC tech startups, many of whom were from Boxee and Tumblr, as those are the APIs we hacked on. We made a hack that we’re calling TumblrTV, which grabs the videos from your tumblr dashboard and creates a Boxee Box channel out of them. Check it out, if you’re so inclined. Myself, Eric Sluyter, Adam Krebs, and Yuriy Skobov stayed up all night (well most of us did) and ate and drank a lot of unhealthy things attempting to get it finished. But we did, and it’s awesome! Try it, seriously!
As you can see, Adam sat his netbook on a fan for the duration of the hackathon, as it’s prone to overheating. We thought it was pretty funny.
We got pretty loopy at around 4 AM, which I think makes sense. Surprisingly, though, it wasn’t very hard to concentrate (for me at least). I only got exhausted after the whole thing was over. We spent a lot of time on trying to get the Boxee Box’s remote buttons to correctly interact with our app, which ended up being hugely annoying – so much so, in fact, that we ended up scrapping our original button-interaction idea and hacking (what else?) a solution via remapping the keyboard.
By the way, all the work here is done client-side, with the exception of the questionably-named “get-bullshit.php” which calls the tumblr API. It was a great way for me to finally get around to learning jQuery.
This guy was great; he’s from tumblr and he was a huge help with some of the trickier aspects of making TumblrTV, especially OAuth (which we again ended up not using due to time constraints – don’t worry, we’re not logging your tumblr creds).
Also, the guys from Boxee gave us a free box for making such a rad hack! Awesome. Check out the TumblrTV code on Github if you’re into that kind of thing.
I <3 HackNY