Fall 2016 HackISU Wrap-up

 

Fall 2016 HackISU Winners for “Best use of the GForgeNEXT API”. Picture (left-to-right): Mehul Shinde, Dig Vijay Kumar Yarlagadda, Chris Matthews, Brendan O’Conner

Last weekend we sponsored our second HackISU Hackathon in Ames, Iowa.  HackISU is run, in part, by both Major League Hacking and HackISU, a student ran organization.  The GForge Group sponsored a prize for “The Best Use of the GForgeNEXT API” and out of all the teams at this fall’s HackISU two demonstrated great projects!

Runner-up: GitHub Migration

The team of Gregory “Charlie” Steenhagen, Justin Wheeler, Nathan Karasch and Jonny Krysh were this semester’s runner-ups.  At the end of the Hackathon they managed to migrate a single project out of GitHub including the Git repository and issues into a GForgeNEXT project.

Winners: GForgeNEXT Chat Commands

The winners for this semester: Mehul Shinde, Dig Vijay Kumar Yarlagadda, Chris Matthews and Brendan O’Conner implemented a way to execute user-created commands that could be ran in GForgeNEXT’s chat rooms.  They demonstrated commands that searched StackOverflow, ran Google searches that both showed up in the GForgeNEXT chat room. They also managed to do simple tasks like create new tickets, update existing tickets and list users assigned to a project.

While both teams demonstrated great ideas our winners edged out the win two ways:

  1. They exercised more of the GForgeNEXT API including use of the user, tracker, project and discussion resources.
  2. GForgeNEXT’s Chat doesn’t implement a way for user’s executed homegrown scripts yet.  This means the execution of any commands isn’t natively supported by our API and the workaround they came up to this limitation was fanastic.  Their engine would poll a given chat room looking for commands (beginning with “/”) and if the command existed it would execute the associated script.  The amount of problem solving that went into dealing with this limitation was impressive.

Overall this semester’s HackISU event was the best we’ve been a part of and we look forward being a part of future event’s.  We’ll conclude with the photo below of our winners who all earned $750 each: