Curious about the previous competitions? Check out the sites for the First or the Second Hackathon.
Build a hardware or software project from idea to prototype in a weekend! Learn about hackathons
You can participate individually or as a team. See our FAQ!
Bring the community together and have a good time. And, we'll throw in some prizes as the icing on the cake, too.
The rules are simple. You have a weekend to build a hardware or software project and show it off to the judges. Okay, there's a little more to it than that, just see our Rules and Presentation Template.
Registration costs $15 and includes snacks, food, and a t-shirt.
Team $600, Individual $200
A project that either creatively or impressively uses hardware as the primary means to provide a service, solve a problem, or facilitate some other abstract creation/interaction. It is possible that a hardware project uses some software for controlling logic, but the primary sophistication lies within the composition or production of the physical components of the project.
Examples: Interactive art, wearable electronics, 3D printed designs, robotic automation, sensor based systems, mechanical logic systems
Team $600, Individual $200, AND prizes from Betamore
A project that either creatively or impressively uses software as the primary means to provide a service, solve a problem, or facilitate some other abstract creation/interaction. It is possible that a software project uses some physical hardware for interaction, but the primary sophistication lies within the composition of the algorithms, tools, or libraries used by the software.
Examples: Games, apps, interactive art, APIs, tools, libraries, visualizations
EXTRA PRIZE! Up to four winners can also choose between 2 months free Betamore Community Membership or $200 off either of Betamore Web Development courses!
$400
The point of this award is to allow fellow competitors to judge and vote on which project they think deserves recognition and need not specifically be a hardware or software project. Voting tickets will be handed out to all audience members when presentations start and competitors are encouraged to bring friends and family to help vote in their favor.
To be eligible, implement a project that creatively uses their personality API. More info about the Traitify API here.
To be eligible, project must meet one of the following:
See the list of available resources here.
Prize: $300
To be eligible, implement a checkers game using concurrent processes and channels in a functional manner while utilizing event sourcing where possible. See the github page for more details and a boilerplate.
Prize: Bose Headphones
To be eligible, implement a project that uses a PayPal, BrainTree or Venmo payment API. Or build on top of Paypal's open-source KrakenJS Node framework
Founder of Robot Fest, a yearly event held at the National Electronics Museum. A “Creative Geek” who tries to connect the left and right sides of his brain while collaborating with engineers and artists. An “out-of-the-box” thinker who is constantly looking for new and fun projects to work on.
Director of the Station North Tool Library's Public Workshop, Chris Lavoie is an exhibiting artist and adjunct faculty for both Towson University and MICA's Sculpture departments. Chris also does both large and small scale professional fabrication with steel, bronze and wood.
Prof. Visual Art at UMBC
An artist who makes interactive installations, works on paper and public interventions. She has exhibited her work widely including the Chelsea Art Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum and many venues abroad such as Ars Electronica and Akademie der Kunste and is currently working with the Artists Research Network, part of LaTrobe University in Melbourne Australia.
A Designer and Social Strategist for Mindgrub who has a passion for creativity & technology. Shervonne has successfully worked in the government, educational and private industries for over 10 years providing creative strategy and digital design. She is active in the Baltimore tech community as an organizer, board member, and speaker. http://www.mindgrub.com/ @NoOrdnryCherry
Buddy has over a decade of experience coordinating and implementing Cybersecurity for a wide range of information technoligy based corporations and federal enterprises since 1998. He is extremely proficient at trends analyst, vulnerability assessment, and risk management. In addition to his career; he enjoys art, sushi, organizing events, supporting creative uses of technology, and being a keyholder for Unallocated Space an active hackerspace in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. http://www.unallocatedspace.org @budhandyman
Engineer by training and entrepreneur by calling, Jason is the Managing Director of DreamIt Baltimore. He is the cofounder of the Baltimore Foundery, an industrial-grade campus for makers. He was the founder and CEO of WhoGlue, a social networking company that he sold to Facebook in 2011. In 2005, he was appointed by Maryland’s Governor to serve as the state’s Entrepreneur in Residence.
Manager of Fab Lab Baltimore, a non-profit, public access digital fabrication space that serves as a resource for students, designers, artists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and other professionals. She holds a BA in Environmental Art from the Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow, Scotland. Mollye has worked in various gallery and studio settings with a wide range of materials. Her interest in the overlap between digital and physical information leads her artistic practice. http://cargocollective.com/mollyebendell
Mark Huson was a founder and longest running president of the Baltimore Node. He's currently part of a small startup, bluering.io, solving the problems of large infrastructure and storage deployments. He resides in Hampden with the cutest dog in the world, Spencer.
Carson is a Software Developer for Traitify. He works mainly with the Traitify.js library - this includes Traitify’s JavaScript API client and widgets. While he mostly writes in CoffeeScript, he is also well versed when it comes to Ruby on Rails and Sinatra. Carson strives to make technology easily adoptable, working hard to make his own creations clean, small, and ready to be used.
Lookingglass Cyber Solutions (Sponsor)
Wes Brown is a proven innovative architect and leader in the Cybersecurity marketplace. As Distinguished Engineer for Lookingglass, Wes is responsible for all aspects of the company’s current and future products. An innovator and researcher, he has spoken at well-know security events such as DefCon, Hack in the Box and BSides, pioneering concepts such as injectable virtual machines, and scalable malware analysis.
Stanley Black and Decker (Sponsor)
Vice President of Breakthrough Innovation where he leads the advanced innovation team at Stanley Black and Decker. 16 years of experience in batteries, chargers, electronics, software and systems design. Specializing in Design to Value and user empathy to produce efficient and effective solutions.
Erik Hummel has over 10 years experience in software engineering with a finance focus in the Baltimore area. First with Legg Mason working on the core asset management platform for Legg Mason and affiliates. Since 2010 Erik has been with PayPal starting within their Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team and moving on to the Platform Engineering team. His latest focus is around platforms and tooling for the engineering staff within PayPal Credit with a strong focus on moving to a Continuous Delivery system and engineering mindset.
Sponsoring companies can elect to contribute extra funds in order to boost the amount of the main hackathon prizes. For every $125, or prize of equivalent cash value, they receive a blue ribbon to recognize their generous contribution to our community event.
Thanks for hosting us and helping us organize!
Thanks for keeping us stylish with those awesome Natty Boh t-shirts!
Upcoming links:
This hackathon is organized by the community for the community. If you have a comment, suggestion, or improvement to make let us know. Anyone is free to make inline comments on our Google docs, you can also comment on Reddit, or send an email.