The Metabob team hosted its first Hackathon, BobHacks, September 25 & 26th, bringing 350 onboard assigned with the age-old task plaguing Developers: make a cool thing! I mean, it’s not quite so simplistic, but our participants did use a public application (given through Metabob’s own API), collecting information about their own/public repositories as well as results for any analyses/information about the codebase.
This allowed participants to then use that API dataset in order to build a brand new dev tool; the real goal (though cool things are always appreciated) was dedicated to helping developers mine useful insights as to what is happening within their repositories!
With just 24 hours available, participants worked day and night discovering, collaborating, and building the right tool for the task. To aid in the ideation process, Metabob’s own Director of AI Ben Reaves and Backend Developer James Luo hosted workshops, enabling attendees to use these insights for the betterment of their tools, while project execution waged on into the wee small hours of the morning. James discussed the Metabob API, and how to access and parse it using JavaScript. Ben’s workshop was dedicated to topic modeling for python code review, and a method used by the Metabob team called tomotopy.
After 24 hours of building, learning, publishing and anticipating, it was time for judging. Judges Howie Xu, Yuan Shen, and Metabob’s own Avi Gopal narrowed down the submissions to 6 finalists.
Our Judging Criteria was as follows:
Amongst a product demo, question and discussion period, and insightful deliberation, 3 stellar projects were given top billing!
It’s a tall ask to have a development tool made and delivered in just a day’s time, let alone have it be intuitive and useful to developers. Our final contestants did the unthinkable with ease, and landed the first Metabob Hackathon back down to Earth with time to spare. We want to thank all of our attendees for making the first ever BobHacks marvelous, as well as the incredible team here who worked back at mission control for making this event possible.