This past Saturday, Susan and Oliver from Ziggeo organized the third New York City Videohackday. Turnout was terrific with over 100 participants and 18 teams submitting a project. The format of a one-day event works well and appears to attract a more diverse group of participants.

I gave a brief opening talk describing what it means to hack, which I characterized in this context as

To rapidly build an inelegant but effective solution to a problem, often using tools and parts in ways other than intended

An example of an epic hardware hack are the CO2 Scrubbers built during the Apollo 13 rescue mission, which I think covers all the points of my definition

The teams that did really well were the ones that headed the advice to pick something small and to focus on building something working (at the expense of polish). There were some great fun hacks including one that made emoji fly like fireworks from a running video based on content!

In retrospect I should have stated the bullet about making things work even more clearly: always start with the hard bits – get the API calls you need working, then write simply glue code and work on the UI last. Why? Because the UI can take time and if you build a UI first but it isn’t hooked up to anything, well then you don’t really have a hack. Without a UI you can always still demo your hack from the command line!