On 6th August, over 100 techy minded individuals descended upon the gorgeous Mint Hotel in Leeds City Centre for a 24 hour coding marathon, Leeds Hack. The concept was to turn up with an idea and leave with a working application.
Teams could consist of up to four people and were generally a mixture of developers and designers. The event is free to the attendees and sponsorship provides them with the venue, food, drink and wifi for the weekend. We decided to get involved by helping to sponsor the event and we issued the attendees with a challenge: what’s the most creative thing you can do with the Esendex SMS API?
The teams working hard on their concepts
One of our Developers, @ruby_gem, headed up the M1 to get involved, she says;
“There was a phenomenal uptake on our API. Over a third of the apps created used it, and I don’t think it was all down to unlocking the beer”.
Event organiser The Hodge, cleverly issued a series of challenges to keep the attendees entertained whilst they hacked away. The swag was unlocked after the achievement of 1000 commits was met, the crisps were unlocked after 100 mentions of #leedshack tweeted and the beer after 50 people had sent an SMS using the Esendex API.
These ranged from a first ever attempt at HTML and CSS to a gesture based iPad UI mockup tool and even a room full of laptops randomly playing parts of the electronic song “Badger Badger Badger”.
Progress could be followed live on with live tweets, IRC chat and commits to source control.
At midday Sunday everyone downed tools and stopped hacking. With 2 minutes each to present their hack, time was of the essence!
The winner of the Esendex Challenge was TxtVia. A clever way of sending SMS using your desktop by integrating the Android system into a Google Chrome Extension. Keep your phone in your drawer at work! Manage your SMS on your phone with TxtVia. Run out of credit? Send using your Esendex account.
We’ll showcase the ones which used our API in upcoming blogs to give you a flavour of what some people chose to do with SMS.
