Any chance you have screenshots/a public repo of the app? Would love to take a look, as judging by the logo the design was nice indeed :)
Congratulations on winning the Hackathon! Did you participate in the December Finals in Palo Alto and this blogpost is just many months late, or have they started a new round competition? If it's the former, I believe we've met (I was on the UW team), if it's the latter, best of luck!
My experience at the Facebook Hackathon was very similar - I was the only Freshman to enter, our team had been cobbled together entirely by chance (2/4 were found by posting on reddit). We were some of the last to demo, and every one that preceded us seemed, at least to me, far more technically impressive. People had built real time games, written web-servers, designed Android apps to handle streaming video, but (almost) no one had a use-case. We essentially strung together API on top of API in some of the most hacky code I've ever written[1], and somehow it all came together in the end to a) work for the demo and b) seem like something people would actually use. Our idea for the final round was far more derivative and banal, and we lost because of it.
We are in the finals in the fall - cool to hear about other people's experiences and what worked and what didn't.
Not really looking for a job at Facebook at the moment since I'm working hard on Runnr.me, but I'm excited to meet some of the other teams and people, hoping to move down to Menlo / Mountain View full time soon.
I was at the finals with you! Funny how long ago that was :P
Also, I'm surprised that most of the students at the finals didn't interview with Facebook. You'd think that a company centered around the hack culture would be an attractive place to work...
Seems like ages, doesn't it? Did you end up getting a position with a company down in the Bay Area for the summer? I'll be at Google and would love to meet up with some of the people from the competition again, there was certainly no lack of good conversation :)
I think we all got interviews at Addepar out of it, and one of the members from the team that had the book-reselling app ended up taking a position at Instagram shortly after, so I suppose he's working at FB in the end ;)
The follow-up was interesting though, in that there was virtually none. The whole thing was very anti-climatic, really. Still very grateful for the experience, and I'm certainly not sad to have it on the ol' resume. You planning to try again next round?
Congratulations on winning the Hackathon! Did you participate in the December Finals in Palo Alto and this blogpost is just many months late, or have they started a new round competition? If it's the former, I believe we've met (I was on the UW team), if it's the latter, best of luck!
My experience at the Facebook Hackathon was very similar - I was the only Freshman to enter, our team had been cobbled together entirely by chance (2/4 were found by posting on reddit). We were some of the last to demo, and every one that preceded us seemed, at least to me, far more technically impressive. People had built real time games, written web-servers, designed Android apps to handle streaming video, but (almost) no one had a use-case. We essentially strung together API on top of API in some of the most hacky code I've ever written[1], and somehow it all came together in the end to a) work for the demo and b) seem like something people would actually use. Our idea for the final round was far more derivative and banal, and we lost because of it.
[1] https://github.com/nickbarnwell/SpunBy.Me