We’re almost to the end of our Eighth Global Hackathon Series, our largest yet. And this past weekend, we had our largest event yet. And, it was AWESOME!
This is #AH8 Silicon Valley.
We’ve been to Silicon Valley before, naturally. Being a company centered around all things tech, hacking and startups, the Silicon Valley is our bedrock. So we knew any SV event was gonna be BIG. We just wanted to make it EVEN BIGGER and better for our developer community.
The Who:
We had attendees come to #AH8 Silicon Valley ALL THE WAY from Israel, Egypt and Amsterdam. That’s right, hackers – Israel! Now, that’s some serious dedication and another reason why we love our community so, so much!
The age of our attendees ranged from 8 – 56 and included hackers from middle school, high school, college and college graduates. Our youngest attendee (eight), participated on a team with his dad and started learning Python when he was just 6 years old!
In total, we had 369 people, 12 sponsors, 64 teams/ projects and one GRAND PRIZE winner.
No big deal.
The Where:
The hackathon was held at HP in Sunnyvale, and not only was it large enough (thankfully, because we sold out way quick) to fit all our hackers inside, it was also just plain awesome. Plenty of windows (so we didn’t feel like we were trapped in a cave – always a plus!) and an outside hacking & eating area.
What about the food?! Mouth-wateringly good. Shoutout to SpoonRocket for bringing in some meals! And that Indian food… That Indian food hit the spot. As did the snacks, beverages, and Red Bulls’ (AKA a hackers life-blood).
Dinner is served at #AH8#SV thanks to @SpoonRocket! Come & get it, #devs! pic.twitter.com/xxklXpv1jz — AngelHack (@AngelHack) July 19, 2015
The What: But it wasn’t only the Red Bull keeping energy high. We’ve rarely seen such passionate, talented, and ENERGETIC people at our other events. You guys were on another level, and we all loved every second of it. From the prize giveaways led by our Jess and our very own CEO, Sabeen Ali (let’s face it, that was just all sorts of amusing), to the dulcet tones of Brian’s normally-volumed MC voice, to the ball of energy and peppiness that is Matt, to YOU GUYS. The passion we saw at this event was REAL. 
Brian, calm and quiet as usual.
Speaking of passion… We can’t go any further without acknowledging our amazing sponsors. These folks showed up with amazing tech, prizes and challenges, and a willingness to really immerse themselves in the experience by interacting and helping out our hackers. And it was beautiful to watch. HP, Clusterpoint, IBM, AWS, SparkPost, Dolby, Autodesk, Sinch, Linode, Respoke, Pebble, and Thalmic Labs. You are champions. As we all know, it’s the attendees that make a truly successful hackathon. We can make sure the venue is great, the food is amazing, and we bring the right sponsors, but if we don’t get passionate and talented devs, designers and business-savvy people who are willing to work their butt’s off over a 36 hour period, we have nothing. Thankfully, we had you guys. All 64 teams of you. We would reach Harry Potter page-length levels if we gave every team a shoutout, so let’s get to some highlights.
The Winners: Our runner-up team was Rydr.
In a world with so UBER, Lyft, and other ride-sharing apps. This team created the Rydr API which integrates 6 ride-sharing apps to pull price estimates, time estimates, and locations of drivers to give you all the info in one app.
Woah.
If that’s the runner-up team, you know our winners had to be somehow even better.
Meet airQuail, made up of team members: Jeff Shaw, Arpan Rajan, Shashank Bangalore Lakshman, Kent Makishima, and Varun Ved.
airQuail monitors pollution levels, temperature and humidity conditions. Smart sensors log data onto the cloud which generates analytics based on data captured, to derive results such as air quality index and weather conditions in localized regions. Smart-city and smart-home applications can leverage this crowd-sourced data to drive decisions on environment, infrastructure and lifestyle!
Congratulations to the AirQuail, our GRAND PRIZE winners for #AH8#SV! Welcome into our #HACKcelerator!!! pic.twitter.com/yLv33DRWOh
— AngelHack (@AngelHack) July 20, 2015
If you attended #AH8 Silicon Valley, thank you for being awesome. We’ll see airQuail in the HACKcelerator!
