The first AbeBooks’ Hackathon took place over the weekend at the University of Victoria. Teams of students from the computer science program took part in the contest that began at 4pm on Friday afternoon and continued for 24 hours.
The challenge was to conceive and produce an innovative application using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform, and then demo the product to a team of developers and engineers from AbeBooks.com. One group of students stayed up the entire 24 hours, working in the computer lab at UVic. Members of staff from AbeBooks were on-hand throughout the 24-hour period to lend advice and encouragement. Prizes were handed out at the conclusion.
“It was great to see the range of ideas that the teams developed; everything from sentiment analysis of tweets to predict the US presidential election and scalable real-time message distribution to a playlist recommendation system that was designed to learn what you like to listen to where,” said Tim Munro, director of engineering at AbeBooks.
It was free to participate and entrants received a copy of a book called Programming Amazon EC2 by Jurg van Vliet, a commemorative t-shirt and enjoyed a valuable learning experience with AWS.
See more photos from the event on Flickr.
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