
The most popular APIs and tech at college hackathons - nealrs
http://studenthackers.devpost.com
======
habosa
Very interesting to see how much more popular Android is for hackathons. I
imagine it's because you don't need a dev account, easy to deploy to a
device/share APKs, and the APIs have fewer limits. But if you ask this same
survey of actual startups, most go iOS first for the $$$.

~~~
gotrecruit
and you don't need a mac to develop android apps, so for most people android
app is essentially free.

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sliverstorm
This has already blocked me. Developed an android app, was asked by several
friends to port it to Apple, didn't want to shell out for a Mac. Even the
Minis, a popular "get a Mac platform for cheap" choice, are several hundred
dollars used.

~~~
spathi_fwiffo
I've heard of people running MacOS and XCode from VirtualBox/QEMU/etc. I guess
you would have to pay for the Mac OS software to install on the VM, but it
would save you on hardware costs.

~~~
arfar
I didn't think that the OS X license let you run it anywhere other than Apple
hardware. That's just something I've heard though, never actually investigated
it.

~~~
spathi_fwiffo
I doubt this is true. I know that historically, Apple users were limited to
Apple hardware by the nature of the architecture. However, Apple switched to
using the same hardware as the rest of the PC world.

Another option would be to make a Hackintosh, actually; if you have a
sufficiently powerful spare machine; this would also need the OS software, so
virtualizing is probably just as easy.

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yodon
Two surprises that caught my eye were Azure beating AWS by more than 30% (416
projects to 307) and Unity3d smoking Unreal (1174 projects to 64 projects)

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bcohen123
Unity3d is almost certainly leading because of all of the oculus sponsorships.

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dfbrown
I think it's more likely because Unity has been targeting the smaller dev
market since it began, while Unreal only seriously started targeting that
market earlier this year with its free version.

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caseysoftware
This is great data. As a former/recovering evangelist, it's great to see how
these things work at a macro level. You always keep track of your own data,
hacks, etc but don't have a good idea of what happens at the hackathons you
didn't attend or for the APIs - colleagues or competitors - you're not
tracking.

+1 to ChallengePost/DevPost for sharing all this.

~~~
nealrs
Thanks Keith, our org dashboards are going to even more with this data!

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ejcx
I'm amazed to see Lua higher than Go, JSP, Scala, and some other stuff
students would be more likely to be exposed to. Maybe students are doing a lot
of NGINX stuff ?

I'm also glad to see PHP high on the list. Good to know it isn't going
anywhere anytime soon, especially with all the work FB is putting into it.

~~~
patio11
_Maybe students are doing a lot of NGINX stuff ?_

<Wages Of A Misspent Youth>World of Warcraft addons.</Wages Of A Misspent
Youth>

~~~
vvanders
Yup, its the defacto scripiting language for games.

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gtrubetskoy
I'm surprised to see MongoDB as #1 in the db list, is it really now taught at
colleges?

My favorite article on MongoDB: [http://nyeggen.com/post/2013-10-18-the-
genius-and-folly-of-m...](http://nyeggen.com/post/2013-10-18-the-genius-and-
folly-of-mongodb/)

~~~
jameshart
Mongo and MySQL - it's like hackathon participants don't really care about
data integrity at all :)

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blhack
Yeah, I mean it's not like anybody has ever built anything useful with either
of those datastores before, amirite?

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fapjacks
At least nothing with Mongo that hasn't completely imploded into a raging
inferno at some point in the project's lifetime. I have never heard of a
project using MongoDB that didn't at some point sting the developers with some
pain points and make people wish they'd never used it in the first place. I
really, _really_ wish it wasn't the case, because I like a lot of MongoDB's
design ideas, but from a production standpoint, it's crap.

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angersock
JSON is not a programming language. C'mon, folks. :|

~~~
stefanmielke
Nor are OpenGL, and WebGL, and AJAX, and JSP. And you could include XML and
XAML in this if you're being picky.

~~~
mobiuscog
And number 1 is HTML...

~~~
rhaps0dy
Welcome to the hackathon scene! Where everyone can be a hacker, even if they
do "business development".

~~~
krrishd
I know this is in (semi)-jest, but I don't think it's a bad thing that
technology seems more accessible than it may actually be.

I don't think it'd be exactly productive if only the most technically capable
people felt like they could even start to enter the industry.

~~~
rhaps0dy
That's not a bad thing. What I don't like (I don't know if it happens in the
USA, but here in Barcelona hackathons it often does) is teams submitting just
a PowerPoint presentation to the hackathon, and sometimes even winning.

~~~
krrishd
That's a valid concern for sure, I've seen exactly what you're talking about.

Interestingly enough though, college hackathons are the only hackathons I've
seen actually reward implementation over concept and the actual technical work
done by teams over future potential.

~~~
rhaps0dy
Right. And college hackathons are the ones the dashboard is about.

The "extra" programming languages may not share the cause with that
phenomenon.

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rgbrgb
Though I wish there was more innovation happening in real estate, a part of me
is pretty happy to have approximately 0 college students building apps in our
vertical. That's the perk of building software only older people care about
for an industry where you still have to talk to adults all day to get anything
done (luckily I have some great adults on my team who do most of the talking).

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nealrs
This is Devpost's, (formerly ChallengePost - oh yeah, we also changed our name
today), Student Hacker Report. We looked at & ranked project tags from a
sample of 13,281 student hackers who participated in 160 student hackathons
and submitted 9,898 projects, either in hackathons or on their Devpost
portfolios.

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theyCallMeSwift
As someone who's spent a lot of time with both developer relations and
Hackathons in general, here are my top 5 insights from this analysis.

1\. The Major League Hacking hardware lab is HUGE for hardware companies. Top
5 have all been there since day zero. New additional are all rising.
[http://mlh.io/hardware-lab](http://mlh.io/hardware-lab)

2\. In every API category, the companies with the best developer relations
programs are in the top 3 performers, usually #1 and #2.

3\. There are big opportunities for companies in the Geo, Music, Database, and
Game Engine spaces to win with student hackers.

4\. Now is a great time to be in developer event marketing. We're heading for
a data revolution no other event marketing industry has.

5\. Node.js IS actually the one true dev language (JK)

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jasonmcalacanis
awesome startup and team.... stoked to have angel invested in this one five
years ago and watched them go 100% dev (they used to do all kinds of
challenges). lots of great stuff coming as well!

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wcummings
I "mentored" at hack beanpot in Boston and was totally surprised by how much
native mobile development was happening. Nearly every entry was a native
mobile app.

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erobbins
I'm surprised C/C++ was so high and ruby so low. I assume the C/C++ position
is due to hardware hackathons mainly.

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bennader_
This is awesome product

