This past Saturday was Video Hackday in New York City. It had been organized by the team at Ziggeo with the help from many others, including a great roster of sponsors. I enjoyed participating and wrote a little hack that you can see here. Even though I am pretty rusty as a developer, I managed to write something that let’s anyone ask a written question (which then lives at its own URL – all handled via Firebase) and others can answer by recording a video response (recording and playback from Ziggeo) which is then analyzed via Clarifai to determine if it is a person answering. If you had told me in say 2000 that all of this could be built by a single engineer in less than 8 hours I would have told you that’s completely impossible.

So why is it possible now? Well that was the topic of the talk I gave at the kickoff for the hackday. Here are the slides that speak mostly for themselves and were inspired by my partner Andy’s post from earlier that week about the No Stack Startups.